Suppression of Stokes scattering and improved optomechanical cooling with squeezed light

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical approach showing that using squeezed light in optomechanical systems can fully suppress Stokes heating, enabling ground-state cooling of nanomechanical resonators regardless of cavity linewidth and mechanical frequency.

Contribution

The study introduces a method to eliminate Stokes heating in optomechanics using squeezed input light, lowering the quantum backaction limit to zero.

Findings

Stokes heating can be fully suppressed with squeezed light.

Final mechanical temperature depends only on thermal phonons and cooperativity.

Ground-state cooling is achievable even with low-frequency resonators.

Abstract

We develop a theory of optomechanical cooling with a squeezed input light field. We show that Stokes heating transitions can be \emph{fully} suppressed when the driving field is squeezed below the vacuum noise level at an appropriately selected squeezing phase and for a finite amount of squeezing. The quantum backaction limit to laser cooling can be therefore moved down to zero and the resulting final temperature is then solely determined by the ratio between the thermal phonon number and the optomechanical cooperativity parameter, independently of the actual values of the cavity linewidth and mechanical frequency. Therefore driving with a squeezed input field allows to prepare nanomechanical resonators, even with low resonance frequency, in their quantum ground state with a fidelity very close to one.