An all-optical trap for a gram-scale mirror.
We report on a stable optical trap suitable for a macroscopic mirror, wherein the dynamics of the mirror are fully dominated by radiation pressure. The technique employs two frequency-offset laser fields to simultaneously create a stiff optical restoring force and a viscous optical damping force. We show how these forces may be used to optically trap a free mass without introducing thermal noise, and we demonstrate the technique experimentally with a 1 g mirror. The observed optical spring has an inferred Young's modulus of 1.2 TPa, 20% stiffer than diamond. The trap is intrinsically cold and reaches an effective temperature of 0.8 K, limited by technical noise in our apparatus.
Corbitt
Thomas
T
LIGO Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Chen
Yanbei
Y
Innerhofer
Edith
E
Müller-Ebhardt
Helge
H
Ottaway
David
D
Rehbein
Henning
H
Sigg
Daniel
D
Whitcomb
Stanley
S
Wipf
Christopher
C
Mavalvala
Nergis
N