We suggest possibilities for manipulation and ground-state cooling of micromechanical oscillators by resonant coupling of the mirror vibrations to narrow optical transitions of a designed material ensemble within a cavity mode. Particles, modeled as a two-level ensemble, create intracavity narrow bandwidth loss or gain and induce tailored asymmetric structuring of the cavity noise spectrum interacting with the oscillator. This facilitates cooling via inhibition of the Stokes-scattering process or enhancement of anti-Stokes scattering even for short low-finesse optical cavities.

• Received 19 June 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.80.061803