Zeptometer displacement sensing using cavity opto-magneto-mechanics

Abstract

Optomechanical systems have been proven to be very useful for precision sensing of a variety of forces and effects. In this work, we propose an opto-magno-mechanical setup for spatial displacement sensing where one mirror of the optical cavity is levitated in vacuum via diamagnetic forces in an inhomogenous magnetic field produced by two layers of permanent magnets. We show that the optomechanical system can sense small changes in separation between the magnet layers, as the mechanical frequency of the levitated mirror shifts with changing magnet layer separation $d$. We use Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) as a figure of merit of the displacement sensing precision, and study the fundamental precision bound that can be reached in our setup. Nonlinear interaction inherently present in the optomechanical Hamiltonian improves the precision, and we show that in the case of a pure state of the optical cavity, one can achieve extremely small displacement sensing precision of $\Delta d\sim36\times10^{-21}\text{m}$. Further, we incorporate decoherence into our system to study the effect of leaking photons from the optical cavity on the QFI.