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MON: Monday Contributed Sessions
MON 20: Quantum Sensing and Decoherence: Contributed Session to Symposium II
MON 20.6: Talk
Monday, September 8, 2025, 17:45–18:00, ZHG009
Optomechanical cooling using a nonlinearly-driven cavity — Surangana Sengupta1, Björn Kubala1,2, Joachim Ankerhold1, and •Ciprian Padurariu1 — 1Institute for Complex Quantum Systems and IQST, Ulm University — 2German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute for Quantum Technologies, Ulm
Conventional optomechanics combines a harmonic cavity mode with a mechanical element that modulates the cavity frequency [1]. The limitation of the method arises due to back-action of the cavity on the mechanical mode. This results in a residual heating effect that sets a limit to the lowest phonon occupation that can be reached via optomechanical cooling.
In this talk, I will show how driving the cavity in a nonlinear fashion can alleviate the residual heating effect, increasing the overall cooling. This method allows cooling down to orders of magnitude lower phonon occupation. As an example, the talk will focus on the case when the nonlinear drive is implemented in a superconducting circuit setup, using a Josephson junction as the nonlinear element.
In the semiclassical regime, our cooling method shows a significant advantage both in the regime where the nonlinearly-driven cavity shows multi-stable states, as well as below the threshold for multi-stability. In the future, a nonlinear cavity drive could be combined with other methods to improve the performance of optomechanical cooling, such as using intrinsically nonlinear cavity modes [2].
[1] F. Marquardt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 093902 (2007).
[2] D. Zoepfl et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 033601 (2023).
Keywords: optomechanical cooling; Josephson effect; inelastic Cooper pair tunneling; nonlinear dynamics; circuit quantum electrodynamics