Atom assisted cavity cooling of a micromechanical oscillator in the unresolved sideband regime

Abstract

The ground state cooling of a mechanical oscillator in an optomechanical cavity containing an ensemble of identical two-level ground-state atoms is studied in the highly unresolved-sideband regime. The system exhibits electromagnetically-induced transparencylike quantum interference effect. The mutual interaction with the cavity optical field gives rise to an indirect coupling between the atomic and mechanical modes. In presence of this interaction, the noise spectrum gets modified and leads to asymmetric cooling and heating rates. Using the quantum master equation, time evolution of the average phonon number is studied and it is observed that the average phonon occupancy in the mechanical resonator exhibits ground-state cooling.