Sideband cooling of micromechanical motion to the quantum ground state

By John Teufel, T. Donner, Dale Li, J. Harlow, M. Allman, Katarina Cicak, A. Sirois, J. Whittaker, Konrad W. Lehnert, Raymond W. Simmonds. Nature, 2011

1,818 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The advent of laser cooling techniques revolutionized the study of many atomic-scale systems, fuelling progress towards quantum computing with trapped ions and generating new states of matter with Bose–Einstein condensates. Analogous cooling techniques can provide a general and flexible method of preparing macroscopic objects in their motional ground state. Cavity optomechanical or electromechanical systems achieve sideband cooling through the strong interaction between light and motion. However, entering the quantum regime—in which a system has less than a single quantum of motion—has been difficult because sideband cooling has not sufficiently overwhelmed the coupling of low-frequency mechanical systems to their hot environments. Here we demonstrate sideband cooling of an approximately 10-MHz micromechanical oscillator to the quantum ground state. This achievement required a large electromechanical interaction, which was obtained by embedding a micromechanical membrane into a superconducting microwave resonant circuit. To verify the cooling of the membrane motion to a phonon occupation of 0.34 ± 0.05 phonons, we perform a near-Heisenberg-limited position measurement within (5.1 ± 0.4)h/2π, where h is Planck’s constant. Furthermore, our device exhibits strong coupling, allowing coherent exchange of microwave photons and mechanical phonons. Simultaneously achieving strong coupling, ground state preparation and efficient measurement sets the stage for rapid advances in the control and detection of non-classical states of motion, possibly even testing quantum theory itself in the unexplored region of larger size and mass. Because mechanical oscillators can couple to light of any frequency, they could also serve as a unique intermediary for transferring quantum information between microwave and optical domains.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a483484c86dcd52770accb6999e901107f071eb9

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Citations in the corpus

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].”
Mechanics of freely‐suspended ultrathin layered materials (2014, background): “possible in the microwave domain using superconductors [87, 88, 89]. Previously, superconducting hybrid systems have been successfully used to cool mechanical resonators to their quantum ground state [112, 113]. The large electrical conductivity of graphene allows one to capacitively couple it to su”
Hybrid quantum circuits: Superconducting circuits interacting with other quantum systems (2012, methodology): “…and Geller, 2004; Etaki et al., 2008; LaHaye et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2010; O’Connell et al., 2010; Pugnetti et al., 2009; Shevchenko et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2006; Teufel et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2008; Wei et al., 2006; Xia and Evers, 2009; Xue et al., 2007a,b,c; Zhang et al., 2009b, 2005).”
Probing Planck-scale physics with quantum optics (2011, background): “Significant experimental progress has been recently made towards this goal, including laser cooling of nano- and micromechanical devices into their quantum ground state (36,37), operation in the strong coupling regime (38–40) and coherent interactions (40, 41).”
Quantum superposition, entanglement, and state teleportation of a microorganism on an electromechanical oscillator (2015, methodology): “[19] was performed in a cryostat at 15 mK.”
Macroscopic quantum states: Measures, fragility, and implementations (2017, background): “This includes ground state cooling of the mechanical motion45, electromechanical 45 Chan et al. (2011); Meenehan et al. (2015); O’Connell et al. (2010); Teufel et al. (2011) 48 entanglement (Palomaki et al., 2013) or squeezing of a micromechanical state (Wollman et al., 2015).”
Pulsed excitation dynamics of an optomechanical crystal resonator near its quantum ground-state of motion (2015, neutral): “optomechanical [3] and electromechanical [2] systems by”