Optomechanical cooling of levitated spheres with doubly-resonant fields

Abstract: Optomechanical cooling of levitated dielectric particles represents a promising new approach in the quest to cool small mechanical resonators towards their quantum ground state. We investigate two-mode cooling of levitated nanospheres in a self-trapping regime. We identify a rich structure of split sidebands (by a mechanism unrelated to usual strong-coupling effects) and strong cooling even when one mode is blue detuned. We show the best regimes occur when both optical fields cooperatively cool and trap the nanosphere, where cooling rates are over an order of magnitude faster compared to corresponding single-sideband cooling rates.