We present a master equation describing the interaction of light with
dielectric objects of arbitrary sizes and shapes. The quantum motion of the
object, the quantum nature of light, as well as scattering processes to all
orders in perturbation theory are taken into account. This formalism extends
the standard master equation approach to the case where interactions among
different modes of the environment are considered. It yields a genuine quantum
description, including a renormalization of the couplings and decoherence
terms. We apply this approach to analyze cavity cooling of the center-of-mass
mode of large spheres. Furthermore, we derive an expression for the
steady-state phonon numbers without relying on resolved-sideband or bad-cavity
approximations.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure
