California Institute of Technology scientists have proposed a levitated silica nanosphere inside an optical cavity, allowing it to be mechanically isolated as well as thermally decoupled from its surroundings.

This would allow quantum mechanical effects to be able to persist for times much longer than in conventional nano-mechanical systems, even at room temperature.

Quantum entanglement initially shared between two light modes could then be transferred onto the motion of two nanospheres trapped in separate cavities, which could then be observed. Or such systems could be coupled to other quantum systems to enable tasks such as quantum information transfer or quantum state manipulation.