  We provide a fully analytical treatment for the partial refrigeration of the
thermal motion of a quantum mechanical resonator under the action of feedback.
As opposed to standard cavity optomechanics where the aim is to isolate and
cool a single mechanical mode, the aim here is to extract the thermal energy
from many vibrational modes within a large frequency bandwidth. We consider a
standard cold-damping technique where homodyne read-out of the cavity output
field is fed into a feedback loop that provides a cooling action directly
applied on the mechanical resonator. Analytical and numerical results predict
that low final occupancies are achievable independently of the number of modes
addressed by the feedback as long as the cooling rate is smaller than the
intermode frequency separation. For resonators exhibiting a few nearly
degenerate pairs of modes cooling is less efficient and a weak dependence on
the number of modes is obtained. These scalings hint towards the design of
frequency resolved mechanical resonators where efficient refrigeration is
possible via simultaneous cold-damping feedback.
