Radiation-pressure cooling and optomechanical instability of a micromirror

By O. Arcizet, P. Cohadon, T. Briant, M. Pinard, A. Heidmann. Nature, 2006

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent table-top optical interferometry experiments and advances in gravitational-wave detectors have demonstrated the capability of optical interferometry to detect displacements with high sensitivity. Operation at higher powers will be crucial for further sensitivity enhancement, but dynamical effects caused by radiation pressure on the interferometer mirrors must be taken into account, and the appearance of optomechanical instabilities may jeopardize the stable operation of the next generation of interferometers. These instabilities are the result of a nonlinear coupling between the motion of the mirrors and the optical field, which modifies the effective dynamics of the mirror. Such ‘optical spring’ effects have already been demonstrated for the mechanical damping of an electromagnetic waveguide with a moving wall, the resonance frequency of a specially designed flexure oscillator, and the optomechanical instability of a silica microtoroidal resonator. Here we present an experiment where a micromechanical resonator is used as a mirror in a very high-finesse optical cavity, and its displacements are monitored with unprecedented sensitivity. By detuning the laser frequency with respect to the cavity resonance, we have observed a drastic cooling of the microresonator by intracavity radiation pressure, down to an effective temperature of 10 kelvin. For opposite detuning, efficient heating is observed, as well as a radiation-pressure-induced instability of the resonator. Further experimental progress and cryogenic operation may lead to the experimental observation of the quantum ground state of a micromechanical resonator, either by passive or active cooling techniques.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5acd24fe1fd0cecb2200ca2c9ca48059c94c4a2f

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Citations in the corpus

Continuous mode cooling and phonon routers for phononic quantum networks (2012, background): “The successful application of laser cooling techniques for cooling isolated vibrational modes of micro- and nanomechanical devices [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] has recently attracted a lot of interest in the control of macroscopic phononic degrees of freedom on a single quantum level.”
Optomechanical crystals (2009, background): “As the study of quantum mesoscale mechanical oscillators has nearly become a reality[25, 26, 27, 28, 29], high frequency mechanics will provide a distinct experimental advantage due to the lower thermal phonon occupancy.”
Quantum feedback: theory, experiments, and applications (2014, methodology): “Cooling of mechanical resonators using ‘‘resolved-sideband cooling’’, a coherent feedback method, has been realized experimentally [227,228,234,236,242,243].”
Electromagnetically induced transparency in optical microcavities (2017, background): “Various experimental systems existing such interactions are proposed and investigated, including FP cavities [94, 95], whispering-gallery microcavities [96–99], microring cavities [100], photonic crystal cavities [101– 104], membranes [105–108], nanostrings [109], nanorods [110–112], hybrid plasmoni”
Resolved-sideband cooling and position measurement of a micromechanical oscillator close to the Heisenberg uncertainty limit (2009, background): “and the ability to use measurement-induced dynamical backactio”
Resolved Sideband Cooling of a Micromechanical Oscillator (2007, background): “Elemental back-action cooling was first observed experimentally in 2006 for various micromechanical oscillators constituting the boundary of very high-finesse optical cavitie”
Phonon-cavity electromechanics (2012, background): “The equations of motion of the parametrically coupled modes ω2 and ω1 can be extracted from equation (1) as ∂H/∂Pn = Ẋn and −∂H/∂Xn= Ṗn, using the identity Pn=mnẊn, giving Ẍ2+ ω2 Q2 Ẋ2+ω(2) 2X2(1+β2X 2 2 )=3cos(ωst )+0X1cos(ωpt ) (2) Ẍ1+ ω1 Q1 Ẋ1+ω(2) 1X1(1+β1X 2 1 )=0X2cos(ωpt ) (3) where ωs =ω2+ δ”