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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

Fabrication and Testing of Microfluidic Optomechanical Oscillators
Published on: May 29, 2014
Passive cooling of a micromechanical oscillator with a resonant electric circuit
K R Brown1, J Britton, R J Epstein
1Time and Frequency Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80305, USA. krbrown@boulder.nist.gov
Abstract:
We cool 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. We demonstrate the technique by cooling a 7 kHz cantilever from room temperature to 45 K, obtaining reasonable agreement with a model for the cooling, damping, and frequency shift. Extending the method to higher frequencies in a cryogenic system could enable ground state cooling and may prove simpler than related optical experiments in a low temperature apparatus.
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