Suppression of extraneous thermal noise in cavity optomechanics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an active noise suppression method in cavity optomechanics that selectively reduces extraneous thermal noise, enhancing displacement sensitivity and optical cooling capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel active noise suppression scheme using dual-mode cavity sensing to selectively cancel extraneous thermal noise without affecting the oscillator's motion.

Findings

Extraneous thermal noise can be effectively suppressed in experiments.

The suppression improves the limit on optical cooling.

Simulation and experiments confirm the method's efficacy.

Abstract

Extraneous thermal motion can limit displacement sensitivity and radiation pressure effects, such as optical cooling, in a cavity-optomechanical system. Here we present an active noise suppression scheme and its experimental implementation. The main challenge is to selectively sense and suppress extraneous thermal noise without affecting motion of the oscillator. Our solution is to monitor two modes of the optical cavity, each with different sensitivity to the oscillator's motion but similar sensitivity to the extraneous thermal motion. This information is used to imprint "anti-noise" onto the frequency of the incident laser field. In our system, based on a nano-mechanical membrane coupled to a Fabry-P\'{e}rot cavity, simulation and experiment demonstrate that extraneous thermal noise can be selectively suppressed and that the associated limit on optical cooling can be reduced.