Cavity cooling of a nanomechanical resonator by light scattering

We present a novel method for opto-mechanical cooling of subwavelength-sized nanomechanical resonators. Our scheme uses a high-finesse Fabry–Perot cavity of small mode volume, within which the nanoresonator acts as a position-dependent perturbation by scattering. In return, the back-action induced by the cavity affects the nanoresonator dynamics and can cool its fluctuations. We investigate such cavity cooling by scattering for a nanorod structure and predict that ground-state cooling is within reach.