Three dimensional cooling and detecting of a nanosphere with a single cavity

TL;DR

This paper presents a scheme to cool and measure the 3D motion of a nanosphere in a cavity using three lasers, enabling ground state cooling and collision detection with potential applications in mass and temperature measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup for 3D cooling and detection of a nanosphere using a single cavity with multiple laser modes, advancing quantum control techniques.

Findings

Achieves ground state cooling in all three dimensions under resolved-sideband conditions.

Enables efficient detection of single-molecule collisions with the nanosphere.

Discusses feasibility considering laser noise and experimental limitations.

Abstract

We propose an experimental scheme to cool and measure the three-dimensional (3D) motion of an optically trapped nanosphere in a cavity. Driven by three lasers on TEM00, TEM01, and TEM10 modes, a single cavity can cool a trapped nanosphere to the quantum ground states in all three dimensions under the resolved-sideband condition. Our scheme can also detect an individual collision between a single molecule and a cooled nanosphere efficiently. Such ability can be used to measure the mass of molecules and the surface temperature of the nanosphere. We also discuss the heating induced by the intensity fluctuation, pointing instability, and the phase noise of lasers, and justify the feasibility of our scheme under current experimental conditions.