Cooling a harmonic oscillator by optomechanical modification of its bath

Abstract

Optomechanical systems show tremendous promise for high sensitivity sensing of forces and modification of mechanical properties via light. For example, similar to neutral atoms and trapped ions, laser cooling of mechanical motion by radiation pressure can take single mechanical modes to their ground state. Conventional optomechanical cooling is able to introduce additional damping channel to mechanical motion, while keeping its thermal noise at the same level, and as a consequence, the effective temperature of the mechanical mode is lowered. However, the ratio of temperature to quality factor remains roughly constant, preventing dramatic advances in quantum sensing using this approach. Here we propose an approach for simultaneously reducing the thermal load on a mechanical resonator while improving its quality factor. In essence, we use the optical interaction to dynamically modify the dominant damping mechanism, providing an optomechanically-induced effect analogous to a phononic band gap. The mechanical mode of interest is assumed to be weakly coupled to its heat bath but strongly coupled to a second mechanical mode, which is cooled by radiation pressure coupling to a red detuned cavity field. We also identify a realistic optomechanical design that has the potential to realize this novel cooling scheme.

4 pages + 3 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Quantum Theory of Cavity-Assisted Sideband Cooling of Mechanical Motion
• Single-photon Optomechanics
• Opto-mechanical transducers for long-distance quantum communication
• Sympathetic cooling of a membrane oscillator in a hybrid mechanical-atomic system
• Dynamics of quartz tuning fork force sensors used in scanning probe microscopy
• Quantum Nonlinear Optics Near Optomechanical Instabilities

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Nonreciprocal ground-state cooling of multiple mechanical resonators
• Simultaneous cooling of coupled mechanical resonators in cavity optomechanics
• Coherent Optomechanical State Transfer between Disparate Mechanical Resonators
• Multimode optomechanical cooling via general dark-mode control
• Domino cooling of a coupled mechanical-resonator chain via cold-damping feedback
• Dynamically induced robust phonon transport and chiral cooling in an optomechanical system
• Heisenberg-Langevin vs. quantum master equation
• Ground-state cooling of mechanical resonators by quantum reservoir engineering
• Coherence and entanglement of mechanical oscillators mediated by coupling to different baths
• Optomechanical heat transfer between molecules in a nanoplasmonic cavity
• Robust optomechanical state transfer under composite phase driving
• Improving photon blockade, entanglement and mechanical-cat-state generation in a generalized cross-Kerr optomechanical circuit
• Accelerated ground-state cooling of an optomechanical resonator via shortcuts to adiabaticity
• Nonreciprocal transition between two nondegenerate energy levels
• Quantum theory of feedback cooling of an anelastic macro-mechanical oscillator
• Quantum simulation of a three-mode optomechanical system based on the Fredkin-type interaction