Back-action ground state cooling of a micromechanical membrane via intensity-dependent interaction

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical approach to ground state cooling of a micromechanical membrane using intensity-dependent radiation pressure coupling, enabling control over vibrational excitations and temperature.

Contribution

It introduces a novel intensity-dependent interaction scheme for back-action cooling of a membrane in an optical cavity, with exact variance calculations.

Findings

Achieves theoretical ground state cooling of the membrane.

Demonstrates control over vibrational excitations via Lamb-Dicke parameter.

Shows potential to reach micro-Kelvin temperatures.

Abstract

We propose a theoretical scheme to show the possibility of achieving the quantum ground state cooling of a vibrating micromechanical membrane inside a high finesse optical cavity by back-action cooling approach. The scheme is based on an intensity-dependent coupling of the membrane to the intracavity radiation pressure field. We find the exact expression for the position and momentum variances of the membrane by solving the linearized quantum Langevin equations in the steady-state, conditioned by the Routh-Hurwitz criterion. We show that by varying the Lamb-Dicke parameter and the membrane's reflectivity one can effectively control the mean number of excitations of vibration of the membrane and also cool down the system to micro-Kelvin temperatures.