Related papers: Super-resolution imaging of a low frequency levita…
The optical lever is a precision displacement sensor with broad applications. In principle, it can track the motion of a mechanical oscillator with added noise at the Standard Quantum Limit (SQL); however, demonstrating this performance…
The center-of-mass motion of a single optically levitated nanoparticle resembles three uncoupled harmonic oscillators. We show how a suitable modulation of the optical trapping potential can give rise to a coupling between two of these…
We study the stochastic dynamics of a particle in a periodically driven potential. For atomic ions trapped in radio-frequency Paul traps, noise heating and laser cooling typically act slowly in comparison with the unperturbed motion. These…
The formalism for computing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for laser radar is reviewed and applied to the tasks of target detection, direction-finding, and phase change estimation with squeezed light. The SNR for heterodyne detection of…
Low-loss transmission and sensitive recovery of weak radio-frequency (rf) and microwave signals is an ubiquitous technological challenge, crucial in fields as diverse as radio astronomy, medical imaging, navigation and communication,…
Optically levitated macroscopic objects are a powerful tool in the field of force sensing, owing to high sensitivity, absolute force calibration, environmental isolation and the advanced degree of control over their dynamics that have been…
Here we present a computational tool for optical tweezers which calculates the particle tracking signal measured with a quadrant detector and the shot-noise limit to position resolution. The tool is a piece of Matlab code which functions…
We describe the design, construction, and operation of an apparatus utilizing a piezoelectric transducer for in-vacuum loading of nanoparticles into an optical trap for use in levitated optomechanics experiments. In contrast to commonly…
Nanoparticles levitated in an optical trap provide a versatile platform to study mechanical oscillators in a controlled environment with tuneable parameters. Recently, it has become possible to couple two of these optomechanical…
Imaging of the optical properties of individual nanosystems beyond fluorescence can provide a wealth of information. However, the minute signals for absorption and dispersion are challenging to observe, and only specialized techniques…
Sub-nanometer displacement detection lays the solid foundation for critical applications in modern metrology. In-plane displacement sensing, however, is mainly dominated by the detection of differential photocurrent signals from…
We present a wide-field homodyne imaging system capable of recovering intensity and phase images of an object from a single camera frame at an illumination intensity significantly below the noise floor of the camera. By interfering a weak…
We report quantum ground state cooling of a levitated nanoparticle in a room temperature environment. Using coherent scattering into an optical cavity we cool the center of mass motion of a $143$ nm diameter silica particle by more than $7$…
Optical pump-probe spectroscopy is a powerful tool to directly probe the carrier dynamics in materials down to sub-femtosecond resolution. To perform such measurement, while keeping the pump induced perturbation to the sample as small as…
Oscillators based on levitated particles are promising for the development of ultrasensitive force detectors. The theoretical performance of levitated nanomechanical sensors is usually characterized by the so-called thermal noise limit…
Radiofrequency (RF) traps enable highly controlled interactions between charged particles, including reactions between cold molecular ions, sympathetic cooling of one ion species with another, and quantum logic spectroscopy. However, the…
An interferometric fluorescent microscope and a novel theoretic image reconstruction approach were developed and used to obtain super-resolution images of live biological samples and to enable dynamic real time tracking. The tracking…
A high sensitivity force sensor based on dielectric microspheres in vacuum, optically trapped by a single, upward-propagating laser beam, is described. Off-axis parabolic mirrors are used both to focus the 1064~nm trapping beam and to…
We show theoretically that the noise due to laser induced backaction acting on a small nanosphere levitated in a standing-wave trap can be considerably reduced by utilising a suitable reflective boundary. We examine the spherical mirror…
We demonstrate the stable trapping of a levitated nanoparticle on top of an inverted potential using a combination of optical readout and electrostatic control. The feedback levitation on an inverted potential (FLIP) method stabilizes the…