Cooling a Mechanical Oscillator in Opto-electro-mechanical System with Frequency Modulations

Abstract

The opto-electro-mechanical system as a quantum interface between electronic information and optical information plays an important role in quantum information processing. Ground-state cooling of the macroscopic mechanical oscillator is a crucial requirement for this system in order to eliminate the effect of thermal fluctuations on transmission of information. Here, we propose a scheme of ground-state cooling for a mechanical oscillator which is coupled to an optical cavity through radiation pressure force and simultaneously coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity through an effective capacitance. Meanwhile, the periodical frequency modulations are applied to the optical mode, microwave cavity, and mechanical mode, respectively. The cooling efficiency is analyzed and cooling dynamics is simulated numerically by means of covariance matrix. The results show that the Stokes heating processes can be suppressed effectively by means of frequency modulations, and the mechanical oscillator can be cooled to near its ground-state with a higher efficiency than that of a standard optomechanical system due to the double cooling channel. Moreover, a complementary cooling effect is found between these two cooling channels, i.e., a high cooling efficiency can be achieved by cooperation between a good optical cavity and a bad microwave cavity, or vice versa. This cooperative cooling of the double channel breaks the limitation of resolved-sideband regime.