  We study the cooling of a mechanical resonator (MR) that is capacitively
coupled to a double quantum dot (DQD). The MR is cooled by the dynamical
backaction induced by the capacitive coupling between the DQD and the MR. The
DQD is excited by a microwave field and afterwards a tunneling event results in
the decay of the excited state of the DQD. An important advantage of this
system is that both the energy level splitting and the decay rate of the DQD
can be well tuned by varying the gate voltage. We find that the steady average
occupancy, below unity, of the MR can be achieved by changing both the decay
rate of the excited state and the detuning between the transition frequency of
the DQD and the microwave frequency, in analogy to the laser sideband cooling
of an atom or trapped ion in atomic physics. Our results show that the cooling
of the MR to the ground state is experimentally implementable.
