Accelerated ground-state cooling of an optomechanical resonator via shortcuts to adiabaticity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) technique to rapidly cool a mechanical resonator to its ground state in an optomechanical system, significantly reducing cooling time compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

The work develops a transient-state scheme using STA for faster ground-state cooling in a three-mode optomechanical system, expanding the toolkit for rapid quantum control.

Findings

STA achieves ground-state cooling faster than adiabatic methods.

Four coupling protocols analyzed for efficiency.

Cooling time significantly reduced with STA.

Abstract

Ground-state cooling of mechanical resonators is an important task in quantum optomechanics, because it is a necessary prerequisite for creation, manipulation, and application of macroscopic mechanical coherence. Here, we propose a transient-state scheme to accelerate ground-state cooling of a mechanical resonator in a three-mode loop-coupled optomechanical system via shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA). We consider four kinds of coupling protocols and calculate the evolution of the mean phonon number of the mechanical resonator in both the adiabatic and STA cases. We verify that the ground-state cooling of the mechanical resonator can be achieved with the STA method in a much shorter period. The STA method can also be generalized to accelerate other adiabatic processes in cavity optomechanics, and hence this work will open up a new realm of fast optomechanical manipulations.