Ground-State Cooling of a Suspended Nanowire through Inelastic Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling in a Current-Biased Josephson Junction

Journal article, 2011

We demonstrate that a suspended nanowire forming a weak link between two superconductors can be cooled to its motional ground state by a supercurrent flow. The predicted cooling mechanism has its origins in magnetic field induced inelastic tunneling of the macroscopic superconducting phase associated with the junction. Furthermore, we show that the voltage drop over the junction is proportional to the average population of the vibrational modes in the stationary regime, a phenomenon which can be used to probe the level of cooling.