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Quantum mechanics

The gentle cooling touch of light

Nature volume 478, pages 47–48 (2011)Cite this article

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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

When you face direct sunlight, besides the brightness and heat that you experience, there is a rather subtle effect. The light produces a force pushing at you — admittedly a tiny one, corresponding to the weight of a few grains of sand. In the past few years, however, researchers have learned how to harness these light forces in the nanoworld and to use them to manipulate the mechanical vibrations of small objects, with remarkable results. On page 89 of this issue, Painter and colleagues (Chan et al.1) describe how they have exploited laser light to dampen the motion of a nanomechanical resonator. On entering the quantum regime, the vibrational energy of the resonator is no longer continuous. Instead, it is in the form of discrete quanta called phonons. The authors' experiment is the first successful attempt of this type to squeeze essentially all the phonons out of the resonator, leaving the system's vibrations in the lowest possible energy state allowed by quantum mechanics — the ground state. Their results finally pave the way for using light to realize many quantum-physical phenomena in such structures.

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Figure 1: Coupling light and mechanical motion.

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  1. Florian Marquardt is at the Institute for Theoretical Physics II, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany.,

    Florian Marquardt

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  1. Florian Marquardt
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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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