Theory of nanoparticle cooling by elliptic coherent scattering

Abstract

Coherent scattering of an elliptically polarised tweezer into a cavity mode provides a promising platform for cooling levitated nanoparticles into their combined rotational and translational quantum regime [Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 163603 (2021)]. This article presents the theory of how aspherical nanoparticles are affected by elliptically polarised laser beams, how two orthogonal cavity modes enable rotational and translational cooling, and how the resulting power spectra contain signatures of rotational non-linearities. We provide analytic expressions for the resulting trapping frequencies, opto-mechanical coupling strengths, cooling rates, and steady-state occupations and we study their dependence on the tweezer ellipticity.