Laser cooling of a nanomechanical oscillator into its quantum ground state

By J. Chan, T. P. M. Alegre, A. Safavi-Naeini, J. T. Hill, Alexander G. Krause, S. Gröblacher, Markus Aspelmeyer, Oskar J. Painter. Nature, 2011

2,026 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The simple mechanical oscillator, canonically consisting of a coupled mass–spring system, is used in a wide variety of sensitive measurements, including the detection of weak forces and small masses. On the one hand, a classical oscillator has a well-defined amplitude of motion; a quantum oscillator, on the other hand, has a lowest-energy state, or ground state, with a finite-amplitude uncertainty corresponding to zero-point motion. On the macroscopic scale of our everyday experience, owing to interactions with its highly fluctuating thermal environment a mechanical oscillator is filled with many energy quanta and its quantum nature is all but hidden. Recently, in experiments performed at temperatures of a few hundredths of a kelvin, engineered nanomechanical resonators coupled to electrical circuits have been measured to be oscillating in their quantum ground state. These experiments, in addition to providing a glimpse into the underlying quantum behaviour of mesoscopic systems consisting of billions of atoms, represent the initial steps towards the use of mechanical devices as tools for quantum metrology or as a means of coupling hybrid quantum systems. Here we report the development of a coupled, nanoscale optical and mechanical resonator formed in a silicon microchip, in which radiation pressure from a laser is used to cool the mechanical motion down to its quantum ground state (reaching an average phonon occupancy number of ). This cooling is realized at an environmental temperature of 20 K, roughly one thousand times larger than in previous experiments and paves the way for optical control of mesoscale mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e2dab819f92ad2d8665c723e5beb49b3d019cd3

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum trajectories and open many-body quantum systems (2014, methodology): “Such driving processes, making use of the coupling of the system to its environment, have been extended to algorithmic cooling in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) systems [43, 44], and are recently being applied to cool the motional modes of macroscopic oscillators to near their quantum ground state”
Bidirectional and efficient conversion between microwave and optical light (2013, methodology): “Both microwave and optical light have been separately used to cool a mechanical resonator to its quantum ground state of motion [28, 29].”
Nobel Lecture: Controlling photons in a box and exploring the quantum to classical boundary (2013, background): “Phys., Vol. 85, No. 3, July–September 2013 field resonators opens a new domain where the manifestations of state superposition and entanglement will soon become observable (Rocheleau et al., 2009; Chan et al., 2011).”