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ISS: Intersectional Sessions

ISS 1: Micro Mechanical Oscillator 1 (Q, TT)

ISS 1.1: Talk

Monday, March 14, 2011, 10:30–10:45, HSZ 02

Listening to the Quantum Drum: Mechanics in its Ground State — •Tobias Donner^1,2, John Teufel³, Ray Simmonds³, and Konrad Lehnert² — ¹Institute for Quantum Electronics, ETH Zurich, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland — ²JILA, University of Colorado and National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO 80309, USA — ³National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO 80305, USA

A mechanical resonator is a physicist's most tangible example of a harmonic oscillator. If cooled to sufficiently low temperatures a mechanical oscillator is expected to behave differently to our classical perception of reality. Examples include entanglement and superposition states where a macroscopic, human made object can be in two places at once. Observing the quantum behavior of a mechanical oscillator is challenging because it is difficult both to prepare the oscillator in a pure quantum state of motion and to detect those states. I will present experiments in which we couple the motion of a micro-fabricated oscillator to the microwave field in a superconducting high-Q resonant circuit. The displacement of the oscillator imprints a phase modulation on the microwave field which we detect with a nearly shot-noise limited interferometer. We employ the radiation pressure force of the microwave photons to cool the mechanical oscillator to its motional ground state.