Mode-selective excitation in parametrically driven coupled quantum oscillators

Abstract

A parametrically driven classical harmonic oscillator exhibits resonant instability when driven at twice its natural frequency, with the lowest energy configuration remaining unaffected by the drive. In contrast, the ground state of the quantum mechanical counterpart shows a non-trivial response to such a drive due to the spatial delocalization of the wavefunction. The standard realization of PR involves modulating the natural frequency of the oscillator. Here we study a different drive protocol in which the coupling between two such quantum harmonic oscillators is modulated parametrically. We show that the drive frequency can in principle be tuned to selectively excite any desired normal mode, while leaving the other close to its ground state. Only states with even quantum numbers in each normal mode are populated. Within the parametric resonance window the excitations follow a power-law decay with respect to occupation number, in contrast to the exponential decay observed off-resonance. We also briefly discuss how this framework can be extended to a system of N coupled oscillators