Ground-state cooling of a mechanical oscillator and detection of a weak force using a Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate the possibility of cooling a mechanical oscillator to its ground state and using it to detect a weak coherent force by means of a hybrid optomechanical quantum device formed by a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined in a high quality factor optical cavity with an oscillatory end mirror. We show using the stochastic cooling technique that the atomic two-body interaction can be utilized to cool the mirror and achieve position squeezing essential for making sensitive measurements of weak forces. We further show that for certain values of the system parameters and spectral range, the atomic two-body interaction can also increase the signal-to-noise ratio and decrease the noise of the off-resonant stationary spectral measurements. We show that the minimum noise is obtained only in the presence of BEC. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.013621