Quantum Theory of Cavity-Assisted Sideband Cooling of Mechanical Motion

Abstract

We present a fully quantum theory describing the cooling of a cantilever coupled via radiation pressure to an illuminated optical cavity. Applying the quantum noise approach to the fluctuations of the radiation pressure force, we derive the opto-mechanical cooling rate and the minimum achievable phonon number. We find that reaching the quantum limit of arbitrarily small phonon numbers requires going into the good cavity (resolved phonon sideband) regime where the cavity linewidth is much smaller than the mechanical frequency and the corresponding cavity detuning. This is in contrast to the common assumption that the mechanical frequency and the cavity detuning should be comparable to the cavity damping.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum nano-electromechanics with electrons, quasiparticles and Cooper pairs: effective bath descriptions and strong feedback effects
• Dynamics of a nanomechanical resonator coupled to a superconducting single-electron transistor

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• Remark on laser linewidth hazard in opto-mechanical cooling
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