E. Innerhofer

An All-Optical Trap for a Gram-Scale Mirror

We report on a stable optical trap suitable for a macroscopic mirror, wherein the dynamics of the mirror are fully dominated by radiation pressure. The technique employs two frequency-offset laser fields to simultaneously create a stiff optical restoring force and a viscous optical damping force. We show how these forces may be used to optically trap a free mass without introducing thermal noise, and we demonstrate the technique experimentally with a 1 g mirror. The observed optical spring has an inferred Youngs modulus of 1.2 TPa, 20% stiffer than diamond. The trap is intrinsically cold and reaches an effective temperature of 0.8 K, limited by technical noise in our apparatus.

Measurement of radiation-pressure-induced optomechanical dynamics in a suspended Fabry-Perot cavity

We report on experimental observation of radiation-pressure induced effects in a high-power optical cavity. These effects play an important role in next-generation gravitational wave detectors, as well as in quantum nondemolition interferometers. We measure the properties of an optical spring, created by coupling of an intense laser field to the pendulum mode of a suspended mirror, and also the parametric instability (PI) that arises from the coupling between acoustic modes of the cavity mirrors and the cavity optical mode. We measure an unprecedented optical rigidity of K=(3.08{+-}0.09)x10{sup 4} N/m, corresponding to an optical rigidity that is 6000 times stiffer than the mechanical stiffness, and PI strength R{approx_equal}3. We measure the unstable nature of the optical spring resonance, and demonstrate that the PI can be stabilized by feedback to the frequency of the laser source.