Ground state cooling of massive mechanical objects remains a difficult task restricted by the unresolved mechanical sidebands. We propose an optomechanically-induced-transparency cooling scheme to achieve ground state cooling of mechanical motion without the resolved sideband condition in a pure optomechanical system with two mechanical modes coupled to the same optical cavity mode. We show that ground state cooling is achievable for sideband resolution ωm/k as low as - 0.003. This provides a new route for quantum manipulation of massive macroscopic devices and high-precision measurements.
LIU Yong-ChunXIAO Yun-FengLUAN Xing-ShengWONG Chee Wei
Quantum manipulation of macroscopic mechanical systems is of great interest in both fundamental physics and ap- plications ranging from high-precision metrology to quantum information processing. For these purposes, a crucial step is to cool the mechanical system to its quantum ground state. In this review, we focus on the cavity optomechanical cooling, which exploits the cavity enhanced interaction between optical field and mechanical motion to reduce the thermal noise. Recent remarkable theoretical and experimental efforts in this field have taken a major step forward in preparing the mo- tional quantum ground state of mesoscopic mechanical systems. This review first describes the quantum theory of cavity optomechanical cooling, including quantum noise approach and covariance approach; then, the up-to-date experimental progresses are introduced. Finally, new cooling approaches are discussed along the directions of cooling in the strong coupling regime and cooling beyond the resolved sideband limit.
