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arXiv · 1502.03506

Multimode laser cooling and ultra-high sensitivity force sensing with nanowires

Mahdi Hosseini·Giovanni Guccione·Harry J. Slatyer·Ben C. Buchler·Ping Koy Lam
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Abstract

Photo-induced forces can be used to manipulate and cool the mechanical motion of oscillators. When the oscillator is used as a force sensor, such as in atomic force microscopy, active feedback is an enticing route to enhancing measurement performance. Here, we show broadband multimode cooling of $-23$ dB down to a temperature of $8 \pm 1$~K in the stationary regime. Through the use of periodic quiescence feedback cooling, we show improved signal-to-noise ratios for the measurement of transient signals. We compare the performance of real feedback to numerical post-processing of data and show that both methods produce similar improvements to the signal-to-noise ratio of force measurements. We achieved a room temperature force measurement sensitivity of $< 2\times10^{-16}$ N with integration time of less than $0.1$ ms. The high precision and fast force microscopy results presented will potentially benefit applications in biosensing, molecular metrology, subsurface imaging and accelerometry.

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Mahdi Hosseini, Giovanni Guccione, Harry J. Slatyer, Ben C. Buchler, Ping Koy Lam. 2015-02-12. Multimode laser cooling and ultra-high sensitivity force sensing with nanowires. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5663

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