Oriol Romero-Isart

University of Innsbruck and
IQOQI, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Innsbruck — Austria

Levitated Nanoparticles in the Quantum Regime

During the last ten years, a fast-growing scientific activity has been devoted to understanding, controlling and using the dynamical degrees of freedom of levitated solid-state objects in vacuum. Levitated nanoparticles can move, rotate and fall. They also have solid-state internal degrees of freedom. At the interface between the fields of cavity optomechanics and atomic and molecular optics, the rich physics of levitated nanoparticles provide unique opportunities for applied and fundamental research. In this talk, we will first motivate and review the research activities in this field. We will then focus on two recent results in our theory group. First, we will discuss how the center-of-mass motion of a micromagnet can be coupled to its internal acoustic phononic modes. This offers a new cooling method and a tool to probe and control the internal physics of an isolated micromagnet. Then, we will discuss how to optimally control the harmonic potential of a levitated nanoparticle to quantum-delocalize its center-of-mass motional state. This has applications for testing quantum mechanics at large scales, enhancing sensitivities of force sensors, and boosting the entangling rate of two weakly interacting nanoparticles.