Cooling of Nanomechanical Resonators by Thermally Activated Single-Electron Transport
Journal article, 2011

We show that the vibrations of a nanomechanical resonator can be cooled to near its quantum ground state by tunneling injection of electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope tip. The interplay between two mechanisms for coupling the electronic and mechanical degrees of freedom results in a bias-voltage-dependent difference between the probability amplitudes for vibron emission and absorption during tunneling. For a bias voltage just below the Coulomb blockade threshold, we find that absorption dominates, which leads to cooling corresponding to an average vibron population of the fundamental bending mode of 0.2.

carbon nanotubes

systems

Author

Fabio Santandrea

University of Gothenburg

Leonid Gorelik

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Condensed Matter Theory

Robert I. Shekhter

University of Gothenburg

Mats Jonson

University of Gothenburg

Physical Review Letters

0031-9007 (ISSN) 1079-7114 (eISSN)

Vol. 106 18

Subject Categories

Physical Sciences

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.186803

More information

Created

10/7/2017