Four-wave-cooling to the single phonon level in Kerr optomechanics

Abstract

Cavity optomechanics has achieved groundbreaking control and detection of mechanical oscillators, based on their coupling to linear electromagnetic modes. Recently, however, there is increasing interest in cavity nonlinearities as resource in radiation-pressure interacting systems. Here, we present a flux-mediated optomechanical device combining a nonlinear superconducting quantum interference cavity with a mechanical nanobeam. We demonstrate how the Kerr nonlinearity of the circuit can be used to enhance the device performance by suppressing cavity frequency noise, and for a counter-intuitive sideband-cooling scheme based on intracavity four-wave-mixing. With a large single-photon coupling rate of up to g₀ = 2π ⋅ 3.6 kHz and a high mechanical quality factor Q_m ≈ 4 ⋅ 10⁵, we achieve an effective four-wave cooperativity of Cfw>100 and demonstrate four-wave cooling of the mechanical oscillator close to its quantum groundstate. Our results advance the recently developed platform of flux-mediated optomechanics and demonstrate how cavity Kerr nonlinearities can be utilized in cavity optomechanics.