Ground-state cooling of mechanical resonators

Abstract

We propose an application of a single Cooper pair box (Josephson qubit) for active cooling of nanomechanical resonators. Latest experiments with Josephson qubits demonstrated that long coherence time of the order of microsecond can be achieved in special symmetry points. Here we show that this level of coherence is sufficient to perform an analog of the well known in quantum optics “laser” cooling of a nanomechanical resonator capacitively coupled to the qubit. By applying an ac driving to the qubit or the resonator, resonators with frequency of order 100 MHz and quality factors higher than ${10}^3$ can be efficiently cooled down to their ground state, while lower-frequency resonators can be cooled down to micro-Kelvin temperatures. We also consider an alternative setup where dc-voltage-induced Josephson oscillations play the role of the ac driving and show that cooling is possible in this case as well.