Passive cooling of a micromechanical oscillator with a resonant electric circuit.
We cool the fundamental mode of a miniature cantilever by capacitively coupling it to a driven rf resonant circuit. Cooling results from the rf capacitive force, which is phase shifted relative to the cantilever motion. We demonstrate the technique by cooling a 7 kHz cantilever from room temperature to 45 K, obtaining reasonable agreement with a model for the cooling, damping, and frequency shift. Extending the method to higher frequencies in a cryogenic system could enable ground state cooling and may prove simpler than related optical experiments in a low temperature apparatus.
Brown
K R
KR
Time and Frequency Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80305, USA. krbrown@boulder.nist.gov
Britton
J
J
Epstein
R J
RJ
Chiaverini
J
J
Leibfried
D
D
Wineland
D J
DJ