Routing thermal noise flow and ground-state cooling in an optomechanical plaquette

Abstract: We propose an effective method for cooling two non-degenerate mechanical resonators by routing thermal noise flow in a four-mode optomechanical plaquette. The thermal noise flow between the mechanical resonators can be fully suppressed by addressing the overall loop phase in the plaquette, irrespective of their thermal temperatures. We find that optimal mechanical cooling, even down to the ground state, can be realized in this regime. The thermal noise routing, achieved by dissipation engineering at optomechanical interfaces, provides a valuable and complementary approach to conventional coherent dark-mode control theory. It can be generalized to nonreciprocal control of phonon transport and mechanical cooling, and may find applications in optomechanical networks with complex thermal environments.