Cooling strongly self-organized particles using adiabatic demagnetization

Abstract

We study the dynamics of polarizable particles coupled to a lossy cavity mode that are transversally driven by a laser. Our analysis is performed in the regime where the cavity linewidth exceeds the recoil frequency by several orders of magnitude. Using a two-stage cooling protocol we show that the particles' kinetic energy can be reduced down to the recoil energy. This cooling protocol relies in its first stage on a high laser power such that the particles cool into a strongly self-organized pattern. This can be seen as a strongly magnetized state. In a second stage we adiabatically ramp down the laser intensity such that the particles' kinetic energy is transferred to their potential energy and the particles are ``demagnetized''. In this second stage we optimize the ramping speed which needs to be fast enough to avoid unwanted heating and slow enough such that the dynamics remains to good approximation adiabatic.