Optomechanical cooling of levitated spheres with doubly-resonant fields

TL;DR

This paper explores two-mode optomechanical cooling of levitated nanospheres, revealing enhanced cooling rates and complex sideband structures, advancing the potential for quantum ground state preparation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-mode cooling scheme in a self-trapping regime, demonstrating significantly improved cooling efficiency over single-mode methods.

Findings

Identification of split sidebands unrelated to strong-coupling effects

Strong cooling achieved even with blue detuned modes

Cooling rates over ten times faster than single-sideband cooling

Abstract

Optomechanical cooling of levitated dielectric particles represents a promising new approach in the quest to cool small mechanical resonators towards their quantum ground state. We investigate two-mode cooling of levitated nanospheres in a self-trapping regime. We identify a rich structure of split sidebands (by a mechanism unrelated to usual strong-coupling effects) and strong cooling even when one mode is blue detuned. We show the best regimes occur when both optical fields cooperatively cool and trap the nanosphere, where cooling rates are over an order of magnitude faster compared to corresponding single-sideband cooling rates.