Self-cooling of a micromirror by radiation pressure

By Sylvain Gigan, H. Böhm, Mauro Paternostro, F. Blaser, G. Langer, J. Hertzberg, K. Schwab, D. Bäuerle, Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger. Nature, 2006

788 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cooling of mechanical resonators is currently a popular topic in many fields of physics including ultra-high precision measurements, detection of gravitational waves and the study of the transition between classical and quantum behaviour of a mechanical system. Here we report the observation of self-cooling of a micromirror by radiation pressure inside a high-finesse optical cavity. In essence, changes in intensity in a detuned cavity, as caused by the thermal vibration of the mirror, provide the mechanism for entropy flow from the mirror’s oscillatory motion to the low-entropy cavity field. The crucial coupling between radiation and mechanical motion was made possible by producing free-standing micromirrors of low mass (m ≈ 400 ng), high reflectance (more than 99.6%) and high mechanical quality (Q ≈ 10,000). We observe cooling of the mechanical oscillator by a factor of more than 30; that is, from room temperature to below 10 K. In addition to purely photothermal effects we identify radiation pressure as a relevant mechanism responsible for the cooling. In contrast with earlier experiments, our technique does not need any active feedback. We expect that improvements of our method will permit cooling ratios beyond 1,000 and will thus possibly enable cooling all the way down to the quantum mechanical ground state of the micromirror.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/292e3026ed3a91ed60af3a9d9a890f75d76d86ce

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Citations in the corpus

Near-field cavity optomechanics with nanomechanical oscillators (2009, background): “However, cavity-optomechanical coupling of mechanical oscillators allows exploiting radiation pressure dynamical backaction [16, 17] that is associated with the momentum transfer from the photons involved in the measurement to the probed object and provides a mechanism for cooling [18, 19, 20] or co”
Models of Wave-function Collapse, Underlying Theories, and Experimental Tests (2012, background): “While optical control of cantilevers was under investigation for quite some time it was only in 2006 that two groups reported the successful optical cooling of mechanical cantilevers (Gigan et al., 2006; Schliesser et al., 2006).”
Introduction to quantum noise, measurement, and amplification (2008, background): “…which also deals with microwave cavities coupled to nanomechanical systems and other related setups (Arcizet et al., 2006; Brown et al., 2007; Gigan et al., 2006; Harris et al., 2007; Höhberger-Metzger and Karrai, 2004; Marquardt et al., 2007, 2006; Meystre et al., 1985; Schliesser et al.,…”