Demonstration of an ultracold micro-optomechanical oscillator in a cryogenic cavity

By S. Groeblacher, J. Hertzberg, M. Vanner, G. Cole, Sylvain Gigan, K. Schwab, Markus Aspelmeyer. 2009

274 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Preparing and manipulating quantum states of mechanical resonators is a highly interdisciplinary undertaking that now receives enormous interest for its far-reaching potential in fundamental and applied science. Up to now, only nanoscale mechanical devices achieved operation close to the quantum regime. We report a new micro-optomechanical resonator that is laser cooled to a level of 30 thermal quanta. This is equivalent to the best nanomechanical devices, however, with a mass more than four orders of magnitude larger (43 ng versus 1 pg) and at more than two orders of magnitude higher environment temperature (5 K versus 30 mK). Despite the large laser-added cooling factor of 4,000 and the cryogenic environment, our cooling performance is not limited by residual absorption effects. These results pave the way for the preparation of 100-m scale objects in the quantum regime. Possible applications range from quantum-limited optomechanical sensing devices to macroscopic tests of quantum physics.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3347e5e3b093c21bf441474f3fa040f864a3a76b

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Toward quantum superposition of living organisms (2009, methodology): “We are currently witnessing an experimental race to reach the ground state using different setups, such as, nano- or microcantilevers [16], membranes [17], or vibrating microtoroids [18].”
Phonon-cavity electromechanics (2012, background): “Equations (2) and (3) are solved in the rotating frames at ω2 and ω1 respectively by decomposing X2 and X1 to X2(t )= a2(t )sin(ω2t )+b2(t )cos(ω2t ) (4) X1(t )= a1(t )sin(ω1t )+b1(t )cos(ω1t ) (5) where a2(t ), b2(t ), a1(t ) and b1(t ) are slowly varying compared with ω2 and ω1 respectively.”
Strong and tunable nonlinear optomechanical coupling in a low-loss system (2010, background): “In addition to increased ω, we demonstrate considerable flexibility within a single device: (1) ω can be varied in situ by adjusting the position and tilt of the membrane; (2) it is possible to tune ω to zero, thereby realizing a purely quartic optomechanical coupling ω(x)∝ x4; (3) the gradient of t”