Resolved Sideband Cooling of a Micromechanical Oscillator

Abstract

Micro- and nanoscale opto-mechanical systems provide radiation pressure coupling of optical and mechanical degree of freedom and are actively pursued for their ability to explore quantum mechanical phenomena of macroscopic objects. Many of these investigations require preparation of the mechanical system in or close to its quantum ground state. Remarkable progress in ground state cooling has been achieved for trapped ions and atoms confined in optical lattices. Imperative to this progress has been the technique of resolved sideband cooling, which allows overcoming the inherent temperature limit of Doppler cooling and necessitates a harmonic trapping frequency which exceeds the atomic species' transition rate. The recent advent of cavity back-action cooling of mechanical oscillators by radiation pressure has followed a similar path with Doppler-type cooling being demonstrated, but lacking inherently the ability to attain ground state cooling as recently predicted. Here we demonstrate for the first time resolved sideband cooling of a mechanical oscillator. By pumping the first lower sideband of an optical microcavity, whose decay rate is more than twenty times smaller than the eigen-frequency of the associated mechanical oscillator, cooling rates above 1.5 MHz are attained. Direct spectroscopy of the motional sidebands reveals 40-fold suppression of motional increasing processes, which could enable reaching phonon occupancies well below unity (<0.03). Elemental demonstration of resolved sideband cooling as reported here should find widespread use in opto-mechanical cooling experiments. Apart from ground state cooling, this regime allows realization of motion measurement with an accuracy exceeding the standard quantum limit.

13 pages, 5 figures

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• Quantum Noise Interference and Back-action Cooling in Cavity Nanomechanics
• Dynamical Backaction of Microwave Fields on a Nanomechanical Oscillator
• Cavity-assisted squeezing of a mechanical oscillator
• Establishing EPR-channels between Nanomechanics and Atomic Ensembles
• The optomechanical instability in the quantum regime
• High-sensitivity monitoring of micromechanical vibration using optical whispering gallery mode resonators
• Intrinsic dissipation in nanomechanical resonators due to phonon tunneling
• Multiple membrane cavity optomechanics
• Cavity-Assisted Back Action Cooling of Mechanical Resonators
• Creating and Verifying a Quantum Superposition in a Micro-optomechanical System
• Simultaneous cooling and entanglement of mechanical modes of a micromirror in an optical cavity
• Nanomechanical squeezing with detection via a microwave cavity
• Cooling carbon nanotubes to the phononic ground state with constant electron current
• Cooling and squeezing the fluctuations of a nanomechanical beam by indirect quantum feedback control
• Probing optomechanical correlations between two optical beams down to the quantum level
• Qantum theory of optomechanical cooling
• Monocrystalline AlGaAs heterostructures for high-reflectivity high-Q micromechanical resonators in the MHz regime
• Quantum Theory of Transmission Line Resonator-Assisted Cooling of a Micromechanical Resonator
• Scattering theory of cooling and heating in opto-mechanical systems
• Generating EPR beams in a cavity optomechanical system
• Cooling a mechanical resonator via coupling to a tunable double quantum dot
• Ground state cooling of nanomechanical resonator via parametric linear coupling
• Phase noise and laser-cooling limits of optomechanical oscillators
• Fano-like Anti-resonances in Nanomechanical and Optomechanical Systems
• Atom cooling using the dipole force of a single retroreflected laser beam
• Transport properties of a superconducting single-electron transistor coupled to a nanomechanical oscillator