Steady-state entanglement, cooling, and tristability in a nonlinear optomechanical cavity

Abstract

The interaction of a single-mode field with both a weak Kerr medium and a parametric nonlinearity in an intrinsically nonlinear optomechanical system is studied. The nonlinearities due to the optomechanical coupling and Kerr-down conversion lead to bistability and tristability in the mean intracavity photon number. Also, our work demonstrates that the lower bound of the resolved sideband regime and the minimum attainable phonon number can be less than those of a bare cavity by controlling the parametric nonlinearity and the phase of the driving field. Moreover, we find that in the system under consideration the degree of entanglement between the mechanical and optical modes is dependent on the two stability parameters of the system. For both cooling and entanglement, while parametric nonlinearity increases the optomechanical coupling, the weak Kerr nonlinearity is very useful for extending the domain of the stability region to the desired range in which the minimum effective temperature and maximal entanglement are attainable. Also, as shown in this paper, the present scheme allows us to have significant entanglement in the tristable regime for the lower and middle branches, which makes the current scheme distinct from the bare optomechanical system. © 2014 Optical Society of America.