Four-wave-cooling to the single phonon level in Kerr optomechanics

Abstract

The field of cavity optomechanics has achieved groundbreaking photonic control and detection of mechanical oscillators, based on their coupling to linear electromagnetic modes. Lately, however, there is an uprising interest in exploring cavity nonlinearities as a powerful new resource in radiation-pressure interacting systems. Here, we present a flux-mediated optomechanical device combining a nonlinear Josephson-based superconducting quantum interference cavity with a mechanical nanobeam. We demonstrate how the intrinsic Kerr nonlinearity of the microwave circuit can be used for a counter-intuitive blue-detuned sideband-cooling scheme based on multi-tone cavity driving and intracavity four-wave-mixing. Based on the large single-photon coupling rate of the system of up to $g_0=2\pi \cdot 3.6$kHz and a high mechanical quality factor $Q_{\mathrm{m}}\approx 4\cdot 10^5$, we achieve an effective four-wave cooperativity of ${\mathcal{C}}_{\mathrm{fw}}>100$ and demonstrate four-wave cooling of the mechanical oscillator close to its quantum groundstate, achieving a final occupancy of $n_{\mathrm{m}}\sim 1.6$. Our results significantly advance the recently developed platform of flux-mediated optomechanics and demonstrate how cavity Kerr nonlinearities can be utilized for novel control schemes in cavity optomechanics.

References in corpus (12)

• Sideband Cooling Micromechanical Motion to the Quantum Ground State
• Optomechanically induced transparency
• Amplification and squeezing of quantum noise with a tunable Josephson metamaterial
• Confining the state of light to a quantum manifold by engineered two-photon loss
• Single-photon Optomechanics
• Nanomechanical motion measured with precision beyond the standard quantum limit
• Dynamical Backaction of Microwave Fields on a Nanomechanical Oscillator
• Controllable Coupling between Flux Qubit and Nanomechanical Resonator by Magnetic Field
• Intracavity-squeezed optomechanical cooling
• Quantum analysis of a nonlinear microwave cavity-embedded dc SQUID displacement detector
• Nonlinear microwave response of aluminum weak-link Josephson oscillators
• Thermal radiation from optically driven Kerr (${\chi }^{(3)}$) photonic cavities

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Kerr enhanced backaction cooling in magnetomechanics
• Parametrically enhanced interactions and non-trivial bath dynamics in a photon-pressure Kerr amplifier
• Remote sensing of a levitated superconductor with a flux-tunable microwave cavity
• Kerr enhanced optomechanical cooling in the unresolved sideband regime
• Photon-Pressure with an Effective Negative Mass Microwave Mode
• Single-photon induced instabilities in a cavity electromechanical device
• Optomechanical Backaction in the Bistable Regime
• Design, fabrication and characterization of kinetic-inductive force sensors for scanning probe applications
• Intrinsic Kerr amplification for microwave electromechanics
• Cavity Optomechanical Probe of Gravity Between Massive Mechanical Oscillators
• Kerr-enhanced optomechanical entanglement generation via reservoir design
• Prospects of cooling a mechanical resonator with a transmon qubit in c-QED setup
• Level attraction and idler resonance in a strongly driven Josephson cavity