SPECIAL AMO SEMINAR | Hybrid Optomechanical Systems with Atoms

Recent developments in the field of optomechanics have shown very exciting opportunities. The possibility to cool a mechanical resonator into its motional ground state paves the way to test quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Despite great experimental achievements, the conditions for ground state cooling remain hard to be fulfilled, especially for low-frequency oscillators. In fact, the so called sideband-resolved regime requires a cavity decay much smaller than the mechanical frequency. In order to mitigate this challenge, it is possible to hybridize the optomechanical system via coupling to other resonant media characterized by high quality factors. Atomic ensembles offer a resonant and tunable optical response particularly suitable for this task. We investigate hybrid optomechanical systems with atoms subject to Electromagnetically Induced Transparency or Recoil Induced Resonances as a mean for improving mechanical cooling. Furthermore, we expand this study by eliminating the optical cavity and we consider an electromechanical quantum interface between atoms excited to Rydberg levels and an electrically charged cantilever. We propose and validate via numerical simulations several quantum protocols.