Cooling magnets with sound

Quantum properties occur when particles are cooled to their fundamental quantum ground state, that is to the lowest possible energy level. While so far the only way to cool particles to the ground state has been to make them interact with photons trapped in an electromagnetic resonator, theoretical physicists led by Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero and Oriol Romero-Isart from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with experimentalist Jan Gieseler from Harvard University and ICFO in Barcelona now propose to make the motion of magnetic particles interact with the internal acoustic waves that are confined inside every particle.

Sound waves in micro-magnets

In analogy to photons -- the quanta of light -- vibrations in a solid body can be described as so-called phonons. These small sound wave packets propagate through the crystal lattice of the solid. "The phonons are very isolated and interact with the movement of the particle motion only through magnetic waves," explains Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero. "In our work we now show that this interaction can be controlled by a magnetic field." This allows to realize quantum experiments without photons, and therefore even with light-absorbing particles. "Conversely, we also show that the strong interaction between motion and phonons provides a path to probe and manipulate the elusive and exotic dynamics of acoustic and magnetic waves in very small particles," adds Oriol Romero-Isart. The new method also opens up new possibilities for quantum information processing, for example, by using phonons as a quantum memory.