Quantum Optomechanical Heat Engine

Micromechanical resonators, when cooled down to near their ground state, can be used to explore quantum effects such as superposition and entanglement at a macroscopic scale. Previously, it has been proposed to use electronic feedback to cool a high frequency (10 MHz) resonator to near its ground state. In other work, a low frequency resonator was cooled from room temperature to 18 K by passive optical feedback. Additionally, active optical feedback of atomic force microscope cantilevers has been used to modify their response characteristics, and cooling to approximately 2 K has been measured. Here we demonstrate active optical feedback cooling to 135 +/- 15 mK of a micromechanical resonator integrated with a high-quality optical resonator. Additionally, we show that the scheme should be applicable at cryogenic base temperatures, allowing cooling to near the ground state that is required for quantum experiments--near 100 nK for a kHz oscillator.

When two physical systems share the quantum property of entanglement, measurements of one system appear to determine the state of the other. This peculiar property is used in optical, atomic, and electrical systems in an effort to exceed classical bounds when processing information. We extended the domain of this quantum resource by entangling the motion of a macroscopic mechanical oscillator with a propagating electrical signal and by storing one half of the entangled state in the mechanical oscillator. This result demonstrates an essential requirement for using compact and low-loss micromechanical oscillators in a quantum processor, can be extended to sense forces beyond the standard quantum limit, and may enable tests of quantum theory.