Realization of the degenerate parametric oscillator in electromechanical systems

We consider an electromechanical system where a microwave cavity is coupled to a mechanical resonator, with a mechanical frequency twice the microwave frequency. In this regime, the effective photon-phonon interaction is equivalent to that of a degenerate parametric amplifier, instead of the typical radiation pressure interaction. If the mechanical resonator is strongly driven, it undergoes a phase transition to a state where the energy pumped into the mechanical mode is entirely converted to the photonic mode. Quantum fluctuations smear this phase transition. We describe these effects with a steady-state Fokker-Planck equation in the complex P-representation, and compute the photonic field intensity and quadrature variances, as well as the mechanical amplitude. This Fokker-Planck method performs better than the standard linearization results, when compared to numerical simulations.