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arXiv:2511.15492

Optomechanical disk resonator in the quantum ground state of motion

Andrea Barbero, Samuel Pautrel, Bertrand Evrard, Jérémy Bon, Romain Dezert, Aristide Lemaître, Adrien Borne, Ivan Favero

quant-phSubmitted Nov 19, 2025• Announced Nov 20, 2025
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Abstract

Although they have enabled several advances in the field of optomechanics, optomechanical disk resonators have not yet been operated in the quantum regime. We present the first experimental demonstration of an optomechanical disk resonator prepared in the quantum ground state. With a gigahertz frequency, the mechanical breathing mode of the investigated semiconductor disk reaches a level of excitation below a single phonon when cooled in a dilution refrigerator. We quantify the phonon occupancy of the mechanical mode by performing Brillouin sideband spectroscopy: a conical optical fiber is evanescently coupled to the disk optical whispering-gallery mode, and Stokes and anti-Stokes photons scattered by phonon emission and absorption are counted on a single-photon detector. We measure a suppression of the absorption process corresponding to a phonon occupancy of $0.66\pm0.20$. We experimentally investigate the mechanisms ruling laser-induced heating, which limits the lowest measurable phonon occupancy, and notably witness an extra-cavity heating effect.

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Although they have enabled several advances in the field of optomechanics, optomechanical disk resonators have not yet been operated in the quantum regime. We present the first experimental demonstration of an optomechanical disk resonator prepared in the quantum ground state. With a gigahertz frequency, the mechanical breathing mode of the investigated semiconductor disk reaches a level of excitation below a single phonon when cooled in a dilution refrigerator. We quantify the phonon occupancy of the mechanical mode by performing Brillouin sideband spectroscopy: a conical optical fiber is evanescently coupled to the disk optical whispering-gallery mode, and Stokes and anti-Stokes photons scattered by phonon emission and absorption are counted on a single-photon detector. We measure a suppression of the absorption process corresponding to a phonon occupancy of 0.66±0.200.66\pm0.200.66±0.20. We experimentally investigate the mechanisms ruling laser-induced heating, which limits the lowest measurable phonon occupancy, and notably witness an extra-cavity heating effect.
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Abstract Ground-state cooling of mesoscopic mechanical objects is still a major challenge in the unresolved-sideband regime. We present a frequency modulation (FM) scheme to achieve cooling of the mechanical resonator to its ground-state in a double-cavity optomechanical system containing a mechanical resonator. The mean phonon number is determined by numerically solving a set of differential equations derived from the quantum master equations. Due to efficient suppression of Stokes heating processes in the presence of FM, the ground-state cooling, indicated by numerical calculations, is significantly achievable, regardless of whether in the resolved-sideband regime or the unresolved-sideband regime. Furthermore, by choosing parameters reasonably, the improvement of the quantum cooling limit is found to be capable of being positively correlated with the modulation frequency. This method provides new insight into quantum manipulation and creates more possibilities for applications of quantum devices.
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Abstract We propose a ground state cooling scheme for an optomechanical resonator based on the system of a V-type three-level QD ensemble trapped in a two-mode cavity. The two-mode cavity was pumped by two different deriving fields. We studied the optomechanical cooling under the highly unresolved-sideband and beyond Lamb-Dicke regime (coupling strength between the cavity field and the phonon field not far less than the vibrational frequency). Our results show that the noise spectrum appeared a single peak when the detuning of the QD’s high excitation state and high-frequency driving field equals that of the QD’s low excitation state and low-frequency driving field, otherwise, then appeared double peaks. In the case of double peaks, we can realize the transition between optomechanical cooling and heating by changing the coupling strength of QD with cavity field, which is not available in the case of a single peak. We also studied the evolution of the mean phonon number with time, which is helpful to analyze ground state optomechanical cooling.
Mechanical modes are a potentially useful resource for quantum information applications, such as quantum-level wavelength transducers, due to their ability to interact with electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum. A significant challenge for wavelength transducers is thermomechanical noise in the mechanical mode, which pollutes the transduced signal with thermal states. In this Letter, we eliminate thermomechanical noise in the GHz-frequency mechanical breathing mode of a piezoelectric optomechanical crystal using cryogenic cooling in a dilution refrigerator. We optically measure an average thermal occupancy of the mechanical mode of only 0.7±0.4 phonons, providing a path towards low-noise microwave-to-optical conversion in the quantum regime.