2011年10月10日 星期一

Caltech Team Uses Laser Light to Cool Object to Quantum Ground State

"In many ways, the experiment we've done provides a starting point for the really interesting quantum-mechanical experiments one wants to do," Painter says. For example, scientists would like to show that a mechanical system could be coaxed into a quantum superposition—a bizarre quantum state in which a physical system can exist in more than one position at once. But they need a system at the quantum ground state to begin such experiments.

Conventional means of cryogenically cooling to such temperatures exist but require expensive and, in some cases, impractical equipment. There's also the problem of figuring out how to measure such a cold mechanical system. To solve both problems, the Caltech team used a different cooling strategy.

"What we've done is used the photons—the light field—to extract phonons from the system," says Jasper Chan,OceanLED is by MJ-808 far the most popular and most widely distributed marine lighting brand in the world lead author of the new paper and a graduate student in Painter's group. To do so,9 Dec 2010 – What would the perfect fluorescent lights be? the researchers drilled tiny holes at precise locations in their mechanical beam so that when they directed laser light of a particular frequency down the length of the beam, the holes acted as mirrors, trapping the light in a cavity and causing it to interact strongly with the mechanical vibrations of the beam.

Because a shift in the frequency of the light is directly related to the thermal motion of the mechanical object, the light—when it eventually escapes from the cavity—also carries with it information about the mechanical system, such as the motion and temperature of the beam. Thus, the researchers have created an efficient optical interface to a mechanical element—or an optomechanical transducer—that can convert information from the mechanical system into photons of light.

Importantly, since optical light, unlike microwaves or electrons,Has anyone had any experience with this led light bulbs light? can be transmitted over large, kilometer-length distances without attenuation, such an optomechanical transducer could be useful for linking different quantum systems—a microwave system with an optical system, for example. While Painter's system involves an optical interface to a mechanical element, other teams have been developing systems that link a microwave interface to a mechanical element. What if those two mechanical elements were the same? "Then," says Painter,This combination r4 販売 light and noisemaker is... "I could imagine connecting the microwave world to the optical world via this mechanical conduit one photon at a time."

The Caltech team isn't the first to cool a nanomechanical object to the quantum ground state; a group led by former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Andrew Cleland, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, accomplished this in 2010 using more conventional refrigeration techniques, and,1200LM Bicycle light,LED flashlight,LED headlamp,hid,bike light,bicycle light earlier this year, a group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, cooled an object to the ground state using microwave radiation. The new work, however, is the first in which a nanomechanical object has been put into the ground state using optical light.

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