Cooling of nanomechanical resonator by thermally activated single-electron transport

Abstract

We show that the vibrations of a nanomechanical resonator can be cooled to near its quantum ground state by tunnelling injection of electrons from an STM tip. The interplay between two mechanisms for coupling the electronic and mechanical degrees of freedom results in a bias-voltage dependent difference between the probability amplitudes for vibron emission and absorption during tunneling. For a bias voltage just below the Coulomb blockade threshold we find that absorption dominates, which leads to cooling corresponding to an average vibron population of the fundamental bending mode of 0.2.