Ultrasensitive nano-optomechanical force sensor operated at dilution temperatures.

Cooling down nanomechanical force probes is a generic strategy to enhance their sensitivities through the concomitant reduction of their thermal noise and mechanical damping rates. However, heat conduction becomes less efficient at low temperatures, which renders difficult to ensure and verify their proper thermalization. Here we implement optomechanical readout techniques operating in the photon counting regime to probe the dynamics of suspended silicon carbide nanowires in a dilution refrigerator. Readout of their vibrations is realized with sub-picowatt optical powers, in a situation where less than one photon is collected per oscillation period. We demonstrate their thermalization down to 32 ± 2 mK, reaching very large sensitivities for scanning probe force sensors, 40 zN Hz-1/2, with a sensitivity to lateral force field gradients in the fN m-1 range. This opens the road toward explorations of the mechanical and thermal conduction properties of nanoresonators at minimal excitation level, and to nanomechanical vectorial imaging of faint forces at dilution temperatures.

Probing Electron-Phonon Interaction through Two-Photon Interference in Resonantly Driven Semiconductor Quantum Dots.

We investigate the temperature dependence of photon coherence properties through two-photon interference (TPI) measurements from a single quantum dot (QD) under resonant excitation. We show that the loss of indistinguishability is related only to the electron-phonon coupling and is not affected by spectral diffusion. Through these measurements and a complementary microscopic theory, we identify two independent separate decoherence processes, both of which are associated with phonons. Below 10 K, we find that the relaxation of the vibrational lattice is the dominant contribution to the loss of TPI visibility. This process is non-Markovian in nature and corresponds to real phonon transitions resulting in a broad phonon sideband in the QD emission spectra. Above 10 K, virtual phonon transitions to higher lying excited states in the QD become the dominant dephasing mechanism, this leads to a broadening of the zero phonon line, and a corresponding rapid decay in the visibility. The microscopic theory we develop provides analytic expressions for the dephasing rates for both virtual phonon scattering and non-Markovian lattice relaxation.

Tiny peaks vs mega backgrounds: a general spectroscopic method with applications in resonant Raman scattering and atmospheric absorptions.

A simple method using standard spectrometers with charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors is described to routinely measure background-corrected spectra in situations where the signal is composed of weak spectral features (such as Raman peaks or absorption lines) engulfed in a much stronger (by as much as ∼10(5)) broad background. The principle of the method is to subtract the dominant fixed-structure noise and obtain a shot-noise limited spectrum. The final noise level can therefore be reduced as desired by sufficient integration time. The method requires multiple shifts of the diffraction gratings to extract the pixel-dependent noise structure, which is then used as a flat-field correction. An original peak-retrieval procedure is proposed, demonstrating accurate determination of peak lineshapes and linewidths and robustness on practical examples where conventional methods would not be applicable. Examples are discussed to illustrate the potential of the technique to perform routine resonant Raman measurements of fluorescent dyes with high quantum yield, using conventional Raman systems. The method can equally be applied to other situations where small features are masked by a broad overwhelming background. An explicit example is given with the measurement of weak absorption lines in atmospheric gases.