Optimal Cooling of Multiple Levitated Particles through Far-Field Wavefront-Shaping
Light forces can be harnessed to levitate mesoscopic objects and cool them down towards their motional quantum ground state. Significant roadblocks on the way to scale up levitation from a single to multiple particles in close proximity are the requirements to constantly monitor the particles' positions as well as to engineer complex light fields that react fast and appropriately to their movements. Here, we present an approach that solves both problems at once. By exploiting the information stored in a time-dependent scattering matrix, we introduce a robust formalism enabling the identification of spatially modulated wavefronts, which simultaneously cool down multiple levitated objects of arbitrary shapes. An experimental implementation is suggested based on stroboscopic scattering-matrix measurements and time-adaptive injections of modulated light fields.