prepare a single trapped ion in its motional ground state [@Diedrich1989Laser] and provide one of the cooling stages necessary to achieve Bose Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic gase[@Wieman1999Atom]. Laser cooling also has a long history in optomechanics, and a number of descriptions of laser-cooled optomechanical systems have been presented in the literature [@Braginsky1970Invesitgation; @Braginsky1967Ponderomotive; @2007_OpticsExpress_Kippenberg_Vahala; @Marquardt2009Optomechanics].

To date, two groups have described experiments in which laser cooling (or its microwave analog) has been used to reduce the vibrations of a solid object close to its quantum mechanical ground state (i.e., to mean phonon number less than unity) [@Teufel2011Sideband; @Chan2011Laser]. In these experiments the electromagnetic drive provided both the cooling and single-sideband readout of the mechanical motion.

To achieve a mean phonon number very close to zero, a number of technical obstacles must be overcome. In general, laser cooling is optimized when the mechanical mode is weakly coupled to its thermal bath and well coupled to an electromagnetic cavity. This can be achieved by using a mechanical oscillator of high $Q$, and by applying a strong drive to an optical cavity of high finesse $F$. However even when these criteria are met, there is a minimum temperature that can be 