Dynamically induced robust phonon transport and chiral cooling in an optomechanical system.

The transport of sound and heat, in the form of phonons, can be limited by disorder-induced scattering. In electronic and optical settings the introduction of chiral transport, in which carrier propagation exhibits parity asymmetry, can remove elastic backscattering and provides robustness against disorder. However, suppression of disorder-induced scattering has never been demonstrated in non-topological phononic systems. Here we experimentally demonstrate a path for achieving robust phonon transport in the presence of material disorder, by explicitly inducing chirality through parity-selective optomechanical coupling. We show that asymmetric optical pumping of a symmetric resonator enables a dramatic chiral cooling of clockwise and counterclockwise phonons, while simultaneously suppressing the hidden action of disorder. Surprisingly, this passive mechanism is also accompanied by a chiral reduction in heat load leading to optical cooling of the mechanics without added damping, an effect that has no optical analog. This technique can potentially improve upon the fundamental thermal limits of resonant mechanical sensors, which cannot be attained through sideband cooling.Chiral transport can provide robustness against disorder, resulting in improved resonant modes for sensing and metrology. Here, Kim et al. demonstrate chiral phonon transport, disorder suppression and anomalous cooling without damping in an asymmetrically-pumped optomechanical system.

Cooling a Harmonic Oscillator by Optomechanical Modification of Its Bath.

Optomechanical systems show tremendous promise for the high-sensitivity sensing of forces and modification of mechanical properties via light. For example, similar to neutral atoms and trapped ions, laser cooling of mechanical motion by radiation pressure can take single mechanical modes to their ground state. Conventional optomechanical cooling is able to introduce an additional damping channel to mechanical motion while keeping its thermal noise at the same level, and, as a consequence, the effective temperature of the mechanical mode is lowered. However, the ratio of the temperature to the quality factor remains roughly constant, preventing dramatic advances in quantum sensing using this approach. Here we propose an approach for simultaneously reducing the thermal load on a mechanical resonator while improving its quality factor. In essence, we use the optical interaction to dynamically modify the dominant damping mechanism, providing an optomechanically induced effect analogous to a phononic band gap. The mechanical mode of interest is assumed to be weakly coupled to its heat bath but strongly coupled to a second mechanical mode, which is cooled by radiation pressure coupling to a red-detuned cavity field. We also identify a realistic optomechanical design that has the potential to realize this novel cooling scheme.