Photon-Pressure with an Effective Negative Mass Microwave Mode

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a microwave mode engineered to mimic a negative mass oscillator can invert backaction effects and enable sideband cooling in a coupled circuit, advancing control in quantum systems.

Contribution

The authors engineer a microwave mode in a superconducting circuit to simulate negative mass dynamics and couple it to a low-frequency circuit, revealing novel backaction effects.

Findings

Inversion of dynamical backaction due to negative mass dynamics

Sideband cooling achieved with a blue-detuned pump

Effective negative mass mode mimics inverted energy ladder

Abstract

Harmonic oscillators belong to the most fundamental concepts in physics and are central to many current research fields such as circuit QED, cavity optomechanics and photon-pressure systems. Here, we engineer a microwave mode in a superconducting LC circuit that mimics the dynamics of a negative mass oscillator, and couple it via photon-pressure to a second low-frequency circuit. We demonstrate that the effective negative mass dynamics lead to an inversion of dynamical backaction and to sideband-cooling of the low-frequency circuit by a blue-detuned pump field, which can be intuitively understood by the inverted energy ladder of a negative mass oscillator.