Laser cooling of a Planck mass object close to the quantum ground state

Abstract

Quantum mechanics has so far not been tested for mechanical objects at the scale of the Planck mass $\sqrt{\hslash c/G}\simeq 22\mu \mathrm{g}$. We present an experiment where a 1 mm quartz micropillar resonating at 3.6 MHz with an effective mass of 30 $\mu$g is cooled to 500 mK with a dilution refrigerator, and further optomechanically sideband-cooled to an effective temperature of 3 mK, corresponding to a mode thermal occupancy of 20 phonons. This nearly 1000-fold increase in the mass of an optomechanical system with respect to previous experiments near the quantum ground state opens new perspectives in the exploration of the quantum/classical border.

References in corpus (5)

• Optomechanically induced transparency
• Quantum Theory of Cavity-Assisted Sideband Cooling of Mechanical Motion
• Radiation-pressure cooling and optomechanical instability of a micro-mirror
• Self-cooling of a micro-mirror by radiation pressure
• Probing optomechanical correlations between two optical beams down to the quantum level

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Quantum optomechanical control of long-lived bulk acoustic phonons
• Can the displacemon device test objective collapse models?