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arXiv:1803.00150 · Physical Review A

Cavity-free quantum optomechanical cooling by atom-modulated radiation

Hoi-Kwan Lau, Alexander Eisfeld, Jan Michael Rost

Published Oct 15, 2018• 11 citations
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Abstract

We theoretically study the radiation-induced interaction between the mechanical motion of an oscillating mirror and a remotely trapped atomic cloud. When illuminated by continuous-wave radiation, the mirror motion will induce red and blue sideband radiation, which respectively increases and reduces motional excitation. We find that, by suitably driving $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$-level atoms, the mirror correlation with a specific radiation sideband could be converted from the outgoing to the incoming radiation. Thereby, we can manipulate heating and cooling effects. Particularly, we develop an optomechanical cooling strategy that can mutually cancel the heating effect of the outgoing and incoming radiation, rendering the motional ground state attainable by net cooling. Our proposal complements other efforts in quantum cooling of macroscopic objects since it requires neither a cavity nor perfect alignment.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.98.043827

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We theoretically study the radiation-induced interaction between the mechanical motion of an oscillating mirror and a remotely trapped atomic cloud. When illuminated by continuous-wave radiation, the mirror motion will induce red and blue sideband radiation, which respectively increases and reduces motional excitation. We find that, by suitably driving \ensuremathΛ\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\ensuremathΛ-level atoms, the mirror correlation with a specific radiation sideband could be converted from the outgoing to the incoming radiation. Thereby, we can manipulate heating and cooling effects. Particularly, we develop an optomechanical cooling strategy that can mutually cancel the heating effect of the outgoing and incoming radiation, rendering the motional ground state attainable by net cooling. Our proposal complements other efforts in quantum cooling of macroscopic objects since it requires neither a cavity nor perfect alignment.
We theoretically investigate the coupling of an ultracold three-level atomic gas and a nanomechanical mirror via classical electromagnetic radiation. The radiation pressure on the mirror is modulated by absorption of a probe light field, caused by the atoms which are electromagnetically rendered nearly transparent, allowing the gas to affect the mirror. In turn, the mirror can affect the gas as its vibrations generate optomechanical sidebands in the control field. We show that the sidebands cause modulations of the probe intensity at the mirror frequency, which can be enhanced near atomic resonances. Through the radiation pressure from the probe beam onto the mirror, this results in resonant driving of the mirror. Controllable by the two-photon detuning, the phase relation of the driving to the mirror motion decides upon amplification or damping of mirror vibrations. This permits direct phase locking of laser amplitude modulations to the motion of a nanomechanical element opening a perspective for cavity-free cooling through coupling to an atomic gas.
We investigate a hybrid quantum system combining cavity quantum electrodynamics and optomechanics, where a photon mode is coupled to a four-level tripod atom and to a mechanical mode via radiation pressure. We find that within the single-photon optomechanics and Lamb-Dicke limit, the presence of the tripod atom alters the optical properties of the cavity radiation field drastically, and gives rise to completely quantum destructive interference effects in the optical scattering. The heating rate can be dramatically suppressed via utilizing the completely destructive interference involving atom, photon and phonon, and the obtained result is analogous to that of the resolved sideband regime. The heating process is only connected to the scattering of cavity damping path, which is also far-off resonance. Meanwhile, the cooling rate assisted by the atomic transitions can be significantly enhanced, where the cooling process occurs through the cavity and atomic dissipation paths. Finally, the ground-state cooling of the movable mirror is achievable and even more robust to heating process and thermal noise.
Cooling macroscopic objects is of importance for both fundamental and applied physics. Here we study the optomechanical cooling in a hybrid system which consists of a cloud of atoms coupled to a cavity optomechanical system. On one hand, the asymmetric Fano or electromagnetically induced transparency resonance is explored and the steady-state cooling limits of resonators with frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{\mathrm{m}}$ are analytically obtained, permitting ground-state cooling of massive low-frequency resonators beyond the resolved sideband limit. On the other hand, due to the excitation-saturation effect, the validity of cooling requires the number of atoms to be much larger than the number of steady-state excitations, which is proportional to ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{\mathrm{m}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$. Thus, this limitation plays a minor role in cooling higher-frequency resonators, but becomes important for macroscopic lower-frequency resonators. Under such limitation on the number of atoms, the optimal parameters are quantified. Our study can be a guideline for both theoretical and experimental study of cooling macroscopic objects in atom-optomechanical hybrid systems.
We propose a ground state cooling scheme for an optomechanical resonator based on the system of one Λ-type three-level atom trapped in an optomechanical cavity. This cooling scheme works in a single-photon coupling, and strong atom-cavity coupling regimes. By investigating the cooling dynamics, we find that there is an EIT-like quantum coherent effect in this system which can suppress the undesired transitions for heating. Moreover, our study shows that the final average phonon number of the optomechanical resonator can be smaller than the one based on the sideband cooling. Furthermore, the ground state cooling of the resonator can still be achieved after thermal fluctuations included. In addition, in comparison with previous cooling methods, there are fewer limitations on the decay rates of both the cavity and the atom in this scheme. As a result, this scheme is very suitable to realize the ground cooling of an optomechanical resonator in the experiment.
We propose a cooling scheme for a trapped atom using the phenomenon of cavity-induced double electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), where the atom comprising of four levels in tripod configuration is confined inside a high-finesse optical cavity. By exploiting one cavity-induced EIT, which involves one cavity photon and two laser photons, carrier transition can be eliminated due to the quantum destructive interference of excitation paths. Heating process originated from blue-sideband transition mediated by cavity field can also be prohibited due to the destructive quantum interference with the additional transition between the additional ground state and the excited state. As a consequence, the trapped atom can be cooled to the motional ground state in the leading order of the Lamb-Dicke parameters. In addition, the cooling rate is of the same order of magnitude as that obtained in the cavity-induced single EIT scheme.
We propose an atom-assisted cavity optomechanical system consisting of a single $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$-type three-level atom, a mechanical resonator, and a sideband-driven cavity. The analytic expression of the system's evolution is constructed under the consideration of sideband-driven fields, then steady-state solution of electromagnetically and optomechanically induced transparency and amplification is presented. In the resolved red sideband case, we demonstrate the appearance of electromagnetically and optomechanically induced transparency when the two sets of two-photon resonances are satisfied. Moreover, we set up the eigenstate structure for this atom-assisted cavity optomechanical system, which gives an explicit explanation for the mechanism of the transparency. In the resolved blue sideband case, we can achieve the controllable amplification of the probe light, which is induced by the constructive interactions of photon, atom, and phonon. The proposed scheme offers insight for the tripartite coherent interaction among photons, atoms, and phonons, which will provide great flexibility for phonon storage and motivate the development of quantum information processing.