The ability to prepare a macroscopic mechanical resonator into a quantum superposition state is an outstanding goal of cavity optomechanics. Here, we propose a technique to generate cat states of motion using the intrinsic nonlinearity of a dispersive optomechanical interaction. By applying a bichromatic drive to an optomechanical cavity, our protocol enhances the inherent second-order processes of the system, inducing the requisite two-phonon dissipation. We show that this nonlinear sideband cooling technique can dissipatively engineer a mechanical resonator into a cat state, which we verify using the full Hamiltonian and an adiabatically reduced model. While the fidelity of the cat state is maximized in the single-photon, strong-coupling regime, we demonstrate that Wigner negativity persists even for weak coupling. Finally, we show that our cat state generation protocol is robust to significant thermal decoherence of the mechanical mode, indicating that such a procedure may be feasible for near-term experimental systems.

中文翻译：

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猫运动状态的非线性边带冷却

将宏观机械谐振器制备成量子叠加态的能力是腔光力学的一个突出目标。在这里，我们提出了一种使用色散光机械相互作用的固有非线性来生成猫运动状态的技术。通过将双色驱动应用于光机械腔，我们的协议增强了系统固有的二阶过程，从而引起必要的双声子耗散。我们表明，这种非线性边带冷却技术可以耗散地将机械谐振器设计成猫态，我们使用完整的哈密顿量和绝热简化模型对此进行了验证。虽然猫状态的保真度在单光子、强耦合状态下最大化，但我们证明即使对于弱耦合，维格纳负性也会持续存在。最后，