We study reservoir-engineered entanglement for a cascaded bosonic system consisting of three modes, where the adjacent pairs couple to each other via both the beam-splitter interaction and the coherent parametric interaction with the interaction strengths being tunable. We focus on an optomechanical realization of the model by combining a nondegenerate parametric amplifier and an auxiliary cavity. A great steady-state cavity-mechanical entanglement can be achieved by optimizing the ratio of the interaction strengths, where the optomechanical cavity enacts the cold reservoir, simultaneously laser cooling the pair of hybrid modes delocalized over the auxiliary cavity and the mechanical oscillator. In comparison with the case of cooling a single delocalized mode, the dual-mode cooling approach allows one to obtain a greater amount of entanglement with higher cooling efficiencies and to explore strong entanglement in much broader parameter regions, where the rotating-wave approximation fails for the single-mode cooling case. Moreover, we show that the steady-state cavity-mechanical entanglement is robust to the mechanical thermal noise of the high temperature. The improved reservoir engineering approach can potentially be generalized to other bosonic systems with asymmetric beam-splitter and parametric interactions.

• Received 18 October 2020
• Accepted 1 February 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.103.023525