Simultaneous cooling of coupled mechanical resonators in cavity optomechanics

Abstract: Quantum manipulation of coupled mechanical resonators has become an important research topic in optomechanics because these systems can be used to study the quantum coherence effects involving multiple mechanical modes. A prerequisite for observing macroscopic mechanical coherence is to cool the mechanical resonators to their ground state. Here we propose a theoretical scheme to cool two coupled mechanical resonators by introducing an optomechanical interface. The final mean phonon numbers in the two mechanical resonators are calculated exactly and the results show that the ground-state cooling is achievable in the resolved-sideband regime and under the optimal driving. By adiabatically eliminating the cavity field in the large-decay regime, we obtain analytical results of the cooling limits, which show the smallest achievable phonon numbers and the parameter conditions under which the optimal cooling is achieved. Finally, the scheme is extended to the cooling of a chain of coupled mechanical resonators.