Position Measurement of a Levitated Nanoparticle via Interference with Its Mirror Image

Dynamic Brillouin cooling for continuous optomechanical systems

“…Preparing a single mode mechanical oscillator into its quantum ground state has been experimentally realized in cavity optomechanical systems [10] by utilizing the technique of sideband cooling [11][12][13][14], which plays a central role in a host of novel quantum technologies, ranging from generation of nonclassical states [15][16][17] to quantum sensors [18] and quantum repeaters [19]. Beyond cooling single mechanical modes in cavity optomechanics, novel cooling technologies, for example, multimode cooling methods by using EIT [20], dark-mode control [21], cold-damping feedback [22][23][24], synthetic magnetism [25], and quantum reservoir engineering [26], have been developed in recent years for extended platforms with many degrees of freedom, including multiple degenerate mechanical resonators [27][28][29][30][31], optomechanical arrays [32][33][34][35][36][37], optically levitated mechanical resonators [38,39], and waveguide-coupled resonators [40,41]. The intriguing limit of these cases is the ground-state cooling in continuous optomechanical systems [42,43].…”

Transparent surface radio-frequency trap

“…However, all existing configurations of RF traps have a common issue of optical access limitation due to electrodes geometry. 10 To neglect this issue there were proposed several different approaches, such as: using hemispherical reflecting mirrors; 11 using transparent conductive ITO end-cap electrode in a cylindrical ion trap; 12 as well as direct coupling of surface RF trap with photodetector. 13 We believe that one of the most promising solutions for optical collection efficiency issue can be the use of surface traps with transparent conductive ITO electrodes.…”

Mirror Image Pinpoints a Nanoparticle’s Position

“…But achieving this quantum regime remains out of reach for particles confined in electrical or magnetic ion traps because the limited optical access in such experiments makes detecting the particles' slightest motion challenging. To solve that problem, Lorenzo Dania, at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and his colleagues have introduced a new technique for measuring the position of a levitated nanoparticle in an ion trap [1]. Their method, which detects the particle's position relative to its mirror image, outperforms current state-of-the-art detection methods.…”