Monday, November 13, 2006
Optomechanics: Tiny Mirrors Chill Out
Vienna (Austria), 12 November: Researchers have cooled tiny mirrors down to very low temperatures in the hope of performing quantum-mechanical experiments and developing ultra-precise measuring devices.
Three such microresonators are described in this week’s Nature. Separate teams, led by Markus Aspelmeyer and Pierre-Francois Cohadon, set up tiny mirrors inside optical cavities filled with laser light. Under finely tuned conditions, the mirrors stopped vibrating and self-cooled from room temperature to around 10 kelvin, a drop of around 30 degrees. The authors believe that their mirrors could be cooled further, making them useful as ultra-sensitive motion detectors, perhaps for the detection of gravitational waves.
Dustin Kleckner and Dirk Bouwmeester’s micromirror was cooled by an active rather than a passive process. Their microresonator included an active feedback loop whereby the mirror’s vibrations were observed and then counteracted with radiation pressure from a laser. The micromirror was cooled all the way down to 135 millikelvin, but the team’s main goal is to cool the mirror to its quantum ground state. This would allow them to observe the transition between classical and quantum behavior in a mechanical system.
(ResearchSEA)
Three such microresonators are described in this week’s Nature. Separate teams, led by Markus Aspelmeyer and Pierre-Francois Cohadon, set up tiny mirrors inside optical cavities filled with laser light. Under finely tuned conditions, the mirrors stopped vibrating and self-cooled from room temperature to around 10 kelvin, a drop of around 30 degrees. The authors believe that their mirrors could be cooled further, making them useful as ultra-sensitive motion detectors, perhaps for the detection of gravitational waves.
Dustin Kleckner and Dirk Bouwmeester’s micromirror was cooled by an active rather than a passive process. Their microresonator included an active feedback loop whereby the mirror’s vibrations were observed and then counteracted with radiation pressure from a laser. The micromirror was cooled all the way down to 135 millikelvin, but the team’s main goal is to cool the mirror to its quantum ground state. This would allow them to observe the transition between classical and quantum behavior in a mechanical system.
(ResearchSEA)
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