Optomechanical sideband cooling of a thin membrane within a cavity

Abstract

We present an experimental study of dynamical back-action cooling of the fundamental vibrational mode of a thin semitransparent membrane placed within a high-finesse optical cavity. We study how the radiation–pressure interaction modifies the mechanical response of the vibrational mode, and the experimental results are in agreement with a Langevin equation description of the coupled dynamics. The experiments are carried out in the resolved sideband regime, and we have observed cooling by a factor of ≈350. We have also observed the mechanical frequency shift associated with the quadratic term in the expansion of the cavity mode frequency versus the effective membrane position, which is typically negligible in other cavity optomechanical devices.