Abstract
A pulsed cooling scheme for optomechanical systems is presented that is able to cool at a much faster rate than possible by conventional methods. The proposed scheme can be implemented for both strongly and weakly coupled optomechanical systems. We discuss analytically its underlying working mechanism, which is based on interferometric control of optomechanical interactions, and we demonstrate its efficiency for pulse sequences that have been obtained with methods from optimal control. The large obtained cooling rates suggest that our scheme provides a significant reduction of current experimental constraints, in particular environment temperature, for optomechanical ground state cooling. Finally, the presented framework can be used to create a rich variety of optomechanical interactions and hence offers a novel, readily available toolbox for fast optomechanical quantum control.