Scalable all-optical cold damping of levitated nanoparticles

Understand

The field of levitodynamics has made significant progress towards controlling and studying the motion of a levitated nanoparticle.

• Motional control relies on either autonomous feedback via a cavity or measurement-based feedback via external forces.
• Recent demonstrations of measurement-based ground-state cooling of a single nanoparticle employ linear velocity feedback, also called cold damping, and require the use of electrostatic forces on charged particles via external electrodes.
• Here we introduce a novel all-optical cold damping scheme based on spatial modulation of the trap position that is scalable to multiple particles.