Trapping and Cooling a mirror to its quantum mechanical ground state

Abstract

We propose a technique aimed at cooling a harmonically oscillating mirror to its quantum mechanical ground state starting from room temperature. Our method, which involves the two-sided irradiation of the vibrating mirror inside an optical cavity, combines several advantages over the two-mirror arrangements being used currently. For comparable parameters the three-mirror configuration provides a stiffer trap for the oscillating mirror. Furthermore it prevents bistability from limiting the use of higher laser powers for mirror trapping, and also partially does so for mirror cooling. Lastly, it improves the isolation of the mirror from classical noise so that its dynamics are perturbed mostly by the vacuum fluctuations of the optical fields. These improvements are expected to bring the task of achieving ground state occupation for the mirror closer to completion.

5 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (5)

• Optomechanical entanglement between a movable mirror and a cavity field
• Radiation-pressure cooling and optomechanical instability of a micro-mirror
• Self-cooling of a micro-mirror by radiation pressure
• Cooling a nanomechanical resonator with quantum back-action
• Feedback cooling of a cantilever's fundamental mode below 5 mK

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Ground-state cooling of a micromechanical oscillator: generalized framework for cold damping and cavity-assisted cooling schemes
• Robust entanglement of a micromechanical resonator with output optical fields
• Steady state entanglement in the mechanical vibrations of two dielectric membranes
• Optomechanical trapping and cooling of partially transparent mirrors
• Cavity-Assisted Back Action Cooling of Mechanical Resonators
• Creating and Verifying a Quantum Superposition in a Micro-optomechanical System
• Standard Quantum Limit for Probing Mechanical Energy Quantization
• Cooling and squeezing the fluctuations of a nanomechanical beam by indirect quantum feedback control
• Quantum Theory of Transmission Line Resonator-Assisted Cooling of a Micromechanical Resonator
• Transport properties of a superconducting single-electron transistor coupled to a nanomechanical oscillator