Probing of nonlinear hybrid optomechanical systems via partial accessibility

Abstract

Hybrid optomechanical systems are emerging as a fruitful architecture for quantum technologies. Hence determining the relevant atom-light and light-mechanics couplings is an essential task in such systems. The fingerprint of these couplings is left in the global state of the system during nonequilibrium dynamics. However, in practice, performing measurements on the entire system is not feasible, and thus one has to rely on partial access to one of the subsystems, namely, the atom, the light, or the mechanics. Here we perform a comprehensive analysis to determine the optimal subsystem for probing the couplings. We find that if the light-mechanics coupling is known or irrelevant, depending on the range of the qubit-light coupling, then the optimal subsystem can be either the light or the qubit. In other scenarios, e.g., simultaneous estimation of the couplings, the light is usually the optimal subsystem. This can be explained as light is the mediator between the other two subsystems. Finally, we show that the widely used homodyne detection can extract a fair fraction of the information about the couplings from the light degrees of freedom.