Related papers: Laser cooling of a micromechanical membrane to the…
Quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic vacuum impose an observable quantum limit to the lowest temperatures that can be reached with conventional laser cooling techniques. As laser cooling experiments continue to bring massive…
We review and study the roles of quantum and classical fluctuations in recent cavity-optomechanical experiments which have now reached the quantum regime (mechanical phonon occupancy < 1) using resolved sideband laser cooling. In…
In the usual optomechanical cooling, even if the system has no thermal component, it still has a quantum limit-known as the quantum backaction limit (QBL)-on the minimum phonon number related to shot noise. By studying the side-band cooling…
Quantum ground-state cooling of macroscopic mechanical resonators is of essential importance to both fundamental physics and applied science. Conventional method of laser cooling is limited by the quantum backaction, which requires…
Thermal noise is a major obstacle to observing quantum behavior in macroscopic systems. To mitigate its effect, quantum optomechanical experiments are typically performed in a cryogenic environment. However, this condition represents a…
Optomechanical cavities in the well-resolved-sideband regime are ideally suited for the study of a myriad of quantum phenomena with mechanical systems, including backaction-evading measurements, mechanical squeezing, and generation of…
We present an experimental study of dynamical back-action cooling of the fundamental vibrational mode of a thin semitransparent membrane placed within a high-finesse optical cavity. We study how the radiation pressure interaction modifies…
Cooling a mesoscopic mechanical oscillator to its quantum ground state is elementary for the preparation and control of low entropy quantum states of large scale objects. Here, we pre-cool a 70-MHz micromechanical silica oscillator to an…
Micro- and nanoscale opto-mechanical systems provide radiation pressure coupling of optical and mechanical degree of freedom and are actively pursued for their ability to explore quantum mechanical phenomena of macroscopic objects. Many of…
The motional sideband asymmetry of a mechanical oscillator interacting with a laser field can be observed when approaching the quantum ground state, where the zero-point energy of the mechanical oscillator becomes a sizable contribution to…
The advent of laser cooling techniques revolutionized the study of many atomic-scale systems. This has fueled progress towards quantum computers by preparing trapped ions in their motional ground state, and generating new states of matter…
We study the effect of cavity damping asymmetries on backaction in a "membrane-in-the-middle" optomechanical system, where a mechanical mode modulates the coupling between two photonic modes. We show that in the adiabatic limit, this system…
A resonator can be effectively used as a cooler for another linear oscillator with a much smaller frequency. A huge cooling effect, which could be used to cool a mechanical oscillator below the energy of quantum fluctuations, has been…
Mechanical oscillators can be cooled by coupling them to an optical or microwave cavity. Going beyond the standard quantum noise approach we find an analytic expression for the steady-state phonon number in systems where the position of the…
We theoretically study the laser cooling of cavity optomechanics when the mechanical resonance frequency and damping depend on time. In the regime of weak optomechanical coupling we extend the theory of laser cooling using an adiabatic…
We investigate laser cooling of an ensemble of atoms in an optical cavity. We demonstrate that when atomic dipoles are sychronized in the regime of steady-state superradiance, the motion of the atoms may be subject to a giant frictional…
Recent theoretical work has shown that radiation pressure effects can in principle cool a mechanical degree of freedom to its ground state. In this paper, we apply this theory to our realization of an opto-mechanical system in which the…
We study the mechanical effects of light on an atom trapped in a harmonic potential when an atomic dipole transition is driven by a laser and it is strongly coupled to a mode of an optical resonator. We investigate the cooling dynamics in…
Optomechanical systems show tremendous promise for high sensitivity sensing of forces and modification of mechanical properties via light. For example, similar to neutral atoms and trapped ions, laser cooling of mechanical motion by…
We present a fully quantum theory describing the cooling of a cantilever coupled via radiation pressure to an illuminated optical cavity. Applying the quantum noise approach to the fluctuations of the radiation pressure force, we derive the…