Dynamically induced robust phonon transport and chiral cooling in an optomechanical system.

The transport of sound and heat, in the form of phonons, can be limited by disorder-induced scattering. In electronic and optical settings the introduction of chiral transport, in which carrier propagation exhibits parity asymmetry, can remove elastic backscattering and provides robustness against disorder. However, suppression of disorder-induced scattering has never been demonstrated in non-topological phononic systems.

Cooling a Harmonic Oscillator by Optomechanical Modification of Its Bath.

Optomechanical systems show tremendous promise for the high-sensitivity sensing of forces and modification of mechanical properties via light. For example, similar to neutral atoms and trapped ions, laser cooling of mechanical motion by radiation pressure can take single mechanical modes to their ground state. Conventional optomechanical cooling is able to introduce an additional damping channel to mechanical motion while keeping its thermal noise at the same level, and, as a consequence, the effective temperature of the mechanical mode is lowered.