Abstract

The quest for observing the zero point fluctuations of a macroscopic mechanical oscillator is one of the major objectives in modern optomechanics. If optical cooling techniques have recently allowed to actively cool down various macroscopic oscillators (micro-mirrors, toroidal micro-cavities, membranes or gram scale mirrors), they still have to be combined with standard cryogenic environment to lower the initial phonon occupation number in order to reach the ground state of vibration. We present the recent experimental results obtained at low temperature with micro-toroidal cavities.

© 2009 IEEE