No Arabic abstract
We provide a fully analytical treatment for the partial refrigeration of the thermal motion of a quantum mechanical resonator under the action of feedback. As opposed to standard cavity optomechanics where the aim is to isolate and cool a single mechanical mode, the aim here is to extract the thermal energy from many vibrational modes within a large frequency bandwidth. We consider a standard cold-damping technique where homodyne read-out of the cavity output field is fed into a feedback loop that provides a cooling action directly applied on the mechanical resonator. Analytical and numerical results predict that low final occupancies are achievable independently of the number of modes addressed by the feedback as long as the cooling rate is smaller than the intermode frequency separation. For resonators exhibiting a few nearly degenerate pairs of modes cooling is less efficient and a weak dependence on the number of modes is obtained. These scalings hint towards the design of frequency resolved mechanical resonators where efficient refrigeration is possible via simultaneous cold-damping feedback.
We investigate the role of time delay in cold-damping optomechanics with multiple mechanical resonances. For instantaneous electronic response, it was recently shown in textit{Phys. Rev. Lett. textbf{123}, 203605 (2019)}, that a single feedback loop is sufficient to simultaneously remove thermal noise from many mechanical modes. While the intrinsic delayed response of the electronics can induce single mode and mutual heating between adjacent modes, we propose to counteract such detrimental effects by introducing an additional time delay to the feedback loop. For lossy cavities and broadband feedback, we derive analytical results for the final occupancies of the mechanical modes within the formalism of quantum Langevin equations. For modes that are frequency degenerate collective effects dominate, mimicking behavior similar to Dicke super- and subradiance. These analytical results, corroborated with numerical simulations of both transient and steady state dynamics, allow to find suitable conditions and strategies for efficient single or multimode feedback optomechanics.
We demonstrate optomechanical interference in a multimode system, in which an optical mode couples to two mechanical modes. A phase-dependent excitation-coupling approach is developed, which enables the observation of constructive and destructive optomechanical interferences. The destructive interference prevents the coupling of the mechanical system to the optical mode, suppressing optically-induced mechanical damping. These studies establish optomechanical interference as an essential tool for controlling the interactions between light and mechanical oscillators.
We propose a domino-cooling method to realize simultaneous ground-state cooling of a coupled mechanical-resonator chain through an optomechanical cavity working in the unresolved-sideband regime. This domino-effect cooling is realized by combining the cold-damping feedback on the first mechanical resonator with nearest-neighbor couplings between other neighboring mechanical resonators. We obtain analytical results for the effective susceptibilities, noise spectra, final mean phonon numbers, and cooling rates of these mechanical resonators, and find the optimal-cooling condition for these resonators. Particularly, we analyze a two-mechanical-resonator case and find that by appropriately engineering either the laser power or the feedback, a flexible switch between symmetric and asymmetric ground-state cooling can be achieved. This could be used for preparing symmetric quantum states in mechanical systems. We also simulate the cooling performance of a coupled $N$-mechanical-resonator chain and confirm that these resonators can be simultaneously cooled to their quantum ground states in the unresolved-sideband regime. Under proper parameter conditions, the cooling of the mechanical-resonator chain shows a temperature gradient along the chain. This study opens a route to quantum manipulation of multiple mechanical resonators in the bad-cavity regime.
Cavity optomechanics offers powerful methods for controlling optical fields and mechanical motion. A number of proposals have predicted that this control can be extended considerably in devices where multiple cavity modes couple to each other via the motion of a single mechanical oscillator. Here we study the dynamical properties of such a multimode optomechanical device, in which the coupling between cavity modes results from mechanically-induced avoided crossings in the cavitys spectrum. Near the avoided crossings we find that the optical spring shows distinct features that arise from the interaction between cavity modes. Precisely at an avoided crossing, we show that the particular form of the optical spring provides a classical analog of a quantum-nondemolition measurement of the intracavity photon number. The mechanical oscillators Brownian motion, an important source of noise in these measurements, is minimized by operating the device at cryogenic temperature (500 mK).
Photothermal heating represents a major constraint that limits the performance of many nanoscale optoelectronic and optomechanical devices including nanolasers, quantum optomechanical resonators, and integrated photonic circuits. Although radiation-pressure damping has been reported to cool an individual vibrational mode of an optomechanical resonator to its quantum ground state, to date the internal material temperature within an optomechanical resonator has not been reported to cool via laser excitation. Here we demonstrate the direct laser refrigeration of a semiconductor optomechanical resonator >20K below room temperature based on the emission of upconverted, anti-Stokes photoluminescence of trivalent ytterbium ions doped within a yttrium-lithium-fluoride (YLF) host crystal. Optically-refrigerating the lattice of a dielectric resonator has the potential to impact several fields including scanning probe microscopy, the sensing of weak forces, the measurement of atomic masses, and the development of radiation-balanced solid-state lasers. In addition, optically refrigerated resonators may be used in the future as a promising starting point to perform motional cooling for exploration of quantum effects at mesoscopic length scales,temperature control within integrated photonic devices, and solid-state laser refrigeration of quantum materials