We study theoretically a mechanical oscillator coupled to a superconducting single-electron transistor (SSET), focussing on the regime where incoherent Cooper pair tunnelling in the SSET leads to a negative damping instability of the oscillator. In this regime, large oscillator motion modulates tunnelling in the SSET, which in turn affects the oscillator. This interplay leads to interesting strong feedback effects, including a highly non-thermal stationary oscillator state and a significant enhancement of the low-frequency current noise in the SSET. These effects and others are reminiscent of laser physics: the SSET corresponds to population-inverted atoms while the oscillator corresponds to cavity electro-magnetic field modes. We discuss the extent of this analogy and investigate the linewidth of the oscillator's noise spectrum. Our results are relevant to current experiments, and we point out several feasible measurements that could be done to observe strong feedback effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.100767 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Bennett, Steven, 1980- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Physics.) |
| Rights | © Steven Bennett, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002590607, proquestno: AAIMR32663, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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