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Cavity optomechanical phenomena, e.g. cooling, amplification or optomechanically-induced transparency, emerge due a stark imbalance between the dissipation rates of the optical and mechanical degrees of freedom. However, it has been an unquestioned assumption that the mechanical damping rate is much smaller than optical dissipation rate.

Our goal is to investigate the regime of reversed dissipation hierarchy where the mechanical damping rate is much larger than the optical line width. We will show that this regime can be exploited for cooling and amplifying microwave signals and leads to novel lasing phenomena. The project will be carried out in close collaboration with the group of Tobias Kippenberg, in particular between Andreas Nunnenkamp (Basel) and Vivishek Sudhir (EPFL).