Measurement-based cooling of a nonlinear mechanical resonator

Abstract

We propose two measurement-based schemes to cool a nonlinear mechanical resonator down to energies close to that of its ground state. The protocols rely on projective measurements of a spin degree of freedom, which interacts with the resonator through a Jaynes-Cummings interaction. We show the performance of these cooling schemes, that can be either concatenated -- i.e. built by repeating a sequence of dynamical evolutions followed by projective measurements -- or single-shot. We characterize the performance of both cooling schemes with numerical simulations, and pinpoint the effects of decoherence and noise mechanisms. Due to the ubiquity and experimental relevance of the Jaynes-Cummings model, we argue that our results can be applied in a variety of experimental setups.