BACKGROUND Levitation of large objects has become a widely used technique in science
and engineering, and the control of levitated nano-and micro-objects in vacuum has gained …

Optomechanics is concerned with the use of light to control mechanical objects. As a field, it
has been hugely successful in the production of precise and novel sensors, the …

Torque sensors such as the torsion balance enabled the first determination of the
gravitational constant by Henri Cavendish and the discovery of Coulomb's law. Torque …

Since their invention in 1986 by Arthur Ashkin and colleagues, optical tweezers have
become an essential tool in several fields of physics, spectroscopy, biology …

Miniaturized mechanical sensors rely on resonant operation schemes, unsuited to detect
static forces. We demonstrate a nanomechanical sensor for static forces based on an …

Electromagnetic forces and torques enable many key technologies, including optical
tweezers or dielectrophoresis. Interestingly, both techniques rely on the same physical …

Advances in quantum technologies are giving rise to a revolution in the way fundamental
physics questions are explored at the empirical level. At the same time, they are the seeds …

We experimentally demonstrate the stable trapping of a permanent magnet sphere above a
lead superconductor, at vacuum pressures of 4× 10− 8 mbar. The levitating magnet behaves …

Optically levitated nanoparticles in a vacuum offer a light–matter interface with broad and
easy tunability of all key system parameters. However, the majority of previously reported …

We develop a theory for cavity cooling of the center-of-mass motion of a levitated
nanoparticle through coherent scattering into an optical cavity. We analytically determine the …