Linear cooling of a levitated micromagnetic cylinder by vibration

Abstract

We report feedback cooling of translational and librational degrees of freedom of a levitated m icromagnet cylinder, utilizing a piezoelectric actuator to apply linear feedback to high-Q mechanical modes. The normal modes are measured with a superconducting pick-up coil coupled to a dc SQUID, and phase information is fed back to the piezoelectric actuator to feedback cool a center-of-mass mode to ∼7K, and a librational mode to 830±200mK. Q-factors of 1.0×10^{7} are evaluated for the center-of-mass mode. We find that it is plausible to achieve ground state cooling of the center-of-mass mode by introducing vibration isolation, optimizing the geometry of the pick-up coil to focus on the specific mode of interest and utilizing a state-of-the-art SQUID for detection.