Optomechanical sideband cooling of a micromechanical oscillator close to the quantum ground state

By R. Rivière, Samuel Deleglise, S. Weis, E. Gavartin, O. Arcizet, A. Schliesser, Tobias J. Kippenberg. 2010

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cooling a mesoscopic mechanical oscillator to its quantum ground state is elementary for the preparation and control of quantum states of mechanical objects. Here, we pre-cool a 70-MHz micromechanical silica oscillator to an occupancy below 200 quanta by thermalizing it with a 600-mK cold He-3 gas. Two-level-system induced damping via structural defect states is shown to be strongly reduced and simultaneously serves as a thermometry method to independently quantify excess heating due to the cooling laser. We demonstrate that dynamical back action optical sideband cooling can reduce the average occupancy to 9 +/- 1 quanta, implying that the mechanical oscillator can be found (10 +/- 1)% of the time in its quantum ground state.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da16b7e570cffae8279f91620f9633c9bfd620d5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

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.”
Quantum-coherent coupling of a mechanical oscillator to an optical cavity mode (2011, methodology): “To reduce the mechanical decoherence rate , the microcavity is embedded in a 3 He cryostat (minimum temperature T min = 650 mK”