Levitated nano-oscillators in vacuum are among the highest quality mechanical oscillators, and thus hold great promise for testing fundamental quantum physics, precision measurements and studies of nano thermodynamics.
The aim of this work is twofold: to cool all translational and rotational degrees of freedom of levitated particle with anisotropic susceptibility and to investigate quantum physics with submicron particles. To this end, a silicon nanorod is trapped by optical tweezers in ultra-high vacuum. Due to the anisotropy of the susceptibility tensor, the nanorod has an enhanced interaction with the light field as compared to a spherical particle of the same volume. By controlling the polarization of the trapping light field, feedback will be employed to cool the librational motion of the particle. We aim to explore high mass quantum physics by looking for quantization and superposition of the angular momentum of the nanorod.
|