Passive cooling of a micromechanical oscillator

摘要

Radio waves cool a millimetre-and-a-half-long sliver of silicon in the same manner that lasers cool smaller objects. The technique could make it easier to build ultrasensitive scientific equipment and test the boundary between quantum and classical physics. K. R. Brown and colleagues at the Time and Frequency Division, US National Institute of Standards and Technology cooled the fundamental mode of a miniature cantilever by capacitively coupling it to a driven RF resonant circuit. Cooling results from the RF capacitive force, which is phase shifted relative to the cantilever motion.