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Quantum mechanics

The gentle cooling touch of light

Laser light has been used to cool a nanomechanical resonator to its lowest energy state. The result opens the door to testing the principles of quantum mechanics and to applications in quantum information processing. See Letter p.89

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Figure 1: Coupling light and mechanical motion.

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Correspondence to Florian Marquardt.

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Marquardt, F. The gentle cooling touch of light. Nature 478, 47–48 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/478047a

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