Cooling mechanical motion via vacuum effect of an ensemble of quantum emitters.

We design a hybrid optomechanical setup, in which an ensemble of quantum emitters is coupled with a movable mirror through vacuum interaction. The optical cavity is driven along with the quantum emitters and therefore the coupling between the cavity field and the ensemble determines the dynamics of the coupled system. In particular, we investigated the influence of the vacuum coupling strength on the effective frequency and the effective damping rate of the movable mirror, which shows that the vacuum interaction enhances greatly the effective damping rate. Further, the cooling characteristics of the mechanical resonator is analyzed in detail by counting the effective phonon number in the mirror's motion. It is found that the ground-state cooling of the mechanical motion can be approached in the bad cavity limit when the vacuum coupling is included. The dependence of the cooling of the mechanical motion on the parameters of the cavity and the quantum emitter is investigated in detail numerically.