Eur. Phys. J. D 22, 131-140 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2002-00217-9

Optical phase-space reconstruction of mirror motion at the attometer level

Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (Unité mixte de recherche du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, de l'École Normale Supérieure et de l'Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Website: ) , Case 74, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France

Corresponding author: ^a heidmann@spectro.jussieu.fr

Received: 9 July 2002
Published online: 29 October 2002

Abstract

We describe an experiment in which the quadratures of the position of an harmonically-bound mirror are observed at the attometer level. We have studied the Brownian motion of the mirror, both in the free regime and in the cold-damped regime when an external viscous force is applied by radiation pressure. We have also studied the thermal-noise squeezing when the external force is parametrically modulated. We have observed both the theoretical limit of squeezing at low gain and the parametric oscillation of the mirror for a large gain.