Nanoscale feedback control of six degrees of freedom of a near-sphere.

Manipulating the rotational as well as the translational degrees of freedom of rigid bodies has been a crucial ingredient in diverse areas, from optically controlled micro-robots, navigation, and precision measurements at macroscale to artificial and biological Brownian motors at nanoscale. Here, we demonstrate feedback cooling of all the angular motions of a near-spherical neutral nanoparticle with all the translational motions feedback-cooled to near the ground state. The occupation numbers of the three translational motions are 6 ± 1, 6 ± 1, and 0.

Optical cold damping of neutral nanoparticles near the ground state in an optical lattice.

We propose and demonstrate purely optical feedback cooling of neutral nanoparticles in an optical lattice to an occupation number of 0.85 ± 0.20.