Optomechanical cooling with coherent and squeezed light: the thermodynamic cost of opening the heat valve

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the thermodynamic efficiency of optomechanical cooling methods, including coherent, squeezed light, and Fano mirror setups, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding their heat flow and cooling performance.

Contribution

It introduces a thermodynamic performance analysis of optomechanical cooling, comparing standard and alternative setups using heat flow and efficiency metrics.

Findings

All setups can be characterized by heat flow and efficiency measures.

Squeezed light and Fano mirror setups offer different thermodynamic advantages.

The framework applies to existing experimental parameters.

Abstract

Ground-state cooling of mechanical motion by coupling to a driven optical cavity has been demonstrated in various optomechanical systems. In our work, we provide a so far missing thermodynamic performance analysis of optomechanical sideband cooling in terms of a heat valve. As performance quantifiers, we examine not only the lowest reachable effective temperature (phonon number) but also the evacuated-heat flow as an equivalent to the cooling power of a standard refrigerator, as well as appropriate thermodynamic efficiencies, which all can be experimentally inferred from measurements of the cavity output light field. Importantly, in addition to the standard optomechanical setup fed by coherent light, we investigate two recent alternative setups for achieving ground-state cooling: replacing the coherent laser drive by squeezed light or using a cavity with a frequency-dependent (Fano) mirror. We study the dynamics of these setups within and beyond the weak-coupling limit and give concrete examples based on parameters of existing experimental systems. By applying our thermodynamic framework, we gain detailed insights into these three different optomechanical cooling setups, allowing a comprehensive understanding of the thermodynamic mechanisms at play.