The search for gravitational radiation of non-terrestrial origin

Quantum optomechanical piston engines powered by heat

“…The possibility of inducing coherent self-sustained oscillations in optomechanical systems has been theoretically [24][25][26][27] and experimentally demonstrated [28,29], and it is nowadays a well established technique. However, in all works except [29], this effect is induced by coherent external drivings.…”

“…For example, in the specific system considered in [21], a thermodynamic Otto cycle is induced by the modulation of the laser detuning. Here instead we propose two self-contained optomechanical setups, that we call the single cavity engine and the cascade engine, in which a temperature gradient between two thermal baths is exploited for inducing self-sustained oscillations (phonon lasing [24][25][26][27][28][29]) of a mechanical resonator, in the absence of external forces and external control. In this sense our approach is similar to the analysis of the finite dimensional thermal machines introduced in [11,30], to the 'cooling by heating' setup proposed in [31] and to the concept of Brownian motors reviewed in [32,33].…”

Cavity cooling of atoms: within and without a cavity

“…More recently [13] it was proposed that even with the scatterer outside the cavity, the cavity's resonance can be exploited to enhance the optomechanical friction experienced by the scatterer over that in the standard optomechanical cooling setups [21,22,23], which place the scatterer in front of a single mirror. It is the aim of this section to explore this cooling mechanism, using experimental parameters similar to those in the previous section, and compare it with the cavity mediated cooling mechanism discussed there.…”

Dynamical Casimir effect in superradiant light scattering by Bose—Einstein condensate in an optomechanical cavity

“…[30][31][32][33][34][35][36] The cooling of the motion of mechanical oscillators is possible with positive radiation pressure damping whereas parametric amplification of small forces is observed with negative damping. [27,37] In the fascinating work of Braginsky, [38,39] the mechanical damping due to radiation was first detected in the decay of an excited oscillator. Recently, the cooling of the center-ofmass motion of the mechanical oscillator (i.e., both the measurement and mechanical damping of the random thermal Brownian motion) was attained by using many techniques.…”