  The outstanding progress in nanostructure fabrication and cooling
technologies allows what was unthinkable a few decades ago: bringing
single-mode mechanical vibrations to the quantum regime. The coupling between
photon and phonon excitations is a natural source of nonclassical states of
light and mechanical vibrations, and its study within the field of cavity
optomechanics is developing lightning-fast. Photonic crystal cavities are
highly integrable architectures that have demonstrated the strongest
optomechanical coupling to date, and should therefore play a central role for
such hybrid quantum state engineering. In this context, we propose a realistic
heralding protocol for the on-chip preparation of remotely entangled mechanical
states, relying on the state-of-the-art optomechanical parameters of a
silicon-based nanobeam structure. Pulsed sideband excitation of a Stokes
process, combined with single photon detection, allows writing a delocalised
mechanical Bell state in the system, signatures of which can then be read out
in the optical field. A measure of entanglement in this protocol is provided by
the visibility of a characteristic quantum interference pattern in the emitted
light.
