Friday July 1, 2005
2 PM - 3:30 PM
ENG Z-50 Auditorium

Office Hours:
Friday July 1, 2005
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
ENG B-18

"How to cool micromechanical systems with laser light"
Prof. Khaled Karrai
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat

Laser cooling of atomic gases has been a subject of intense and very prolific research in atom optics. Solid-state systems in contrast were thought so far not ideally predestined for such opto-mechanical manipulations. In this presentation I discuss how exploiting opto-mechanical interactions between a laser field and a deformable micro-mirror could lead to efficient optical cooling. As an exemple I discuss how to perform laser cooling of the vibrational modes of a micro-cantilever. The presentation will focus on the effect of back action of light on a deformable mirror and I will discuss a simple but elegant model that accounts for the observed cooling. At the end of the talk I will discuss the perspectives of cooling micromechanical system in a quantum regime.