On Wednesday 1st November we had Professor Lukas Novotny from the Photonics Laboratory in ETH, Zürich give an insightful AMOPP seminar. His expertise spans many areas, from optical antennas, near-field optics, nonlinear plasmonics and more. However, during his talk he focused on nanoparticle trapping and cooilng. The abstract for his talk can be found below, and he agreed to provide a copy of his slides which you can download here.
Abstract:
Levitated Quantum Nanophotonics
Vijay Jain [a], Martin Frimmer [a], Erik Hebestreit [a], Jan Gieseler[a], Romain Quidant [b], Christoph Dellago [c], and Lukas Novotny [a]
a) ETH Zurich, Photonics Laboratory, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
b) ICFO, Mediterranean Technology Park, 08860 Castelldefels, Spain.
c) University of Vienna, Faculty of Physics, 1090 Vienna, Austria.
I discuss our experiments with optically levitated nanoparticles in ultrahigh vacuum. Using active parametric feedback we cool the particle’s center-of-mass temperature to T = 100μK and reach mean quantum occupation numbers of n = 15. I show that mechanical quality factors of Q = 109 can be reached and that damping is dominated by photon recoil heating. The vacuum-trapped nanoparticle forms an ideal model system for studying non-equilibrium processes, nonlinear interactions, and ultrasmall forces.
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