Optomechanical crystals

By M. Eichenfield, J. Chan, R. Camacho, Kerry J. Vahala, Oskar J. Painter. Nature, 2009

955 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Periodicity in materials yields interesting and useful phenomena. Applied to the propagation of light, periodicity gives rise to photonic crystals, which can be precisely engineered for such applications as guiding and dispersing optical beams, tightly confining and trapping light resonantly, and enhancing nonlinear optical interactions. Photonic crystals can also be formed into planar lightwave circuits for the integration of optical and electrical microsystems. In a photonic crystal, the periodicity of the host medium is used to manipulate the properties of light, whereas a phononic crystal uses periodicity to manipulate mechanical vibrations. As has been demonstrated in studies of Raman-like scattering in epitaxially grown vertical cavity structures and photonic crystal fibres, the simultaneous confinement of mechanical and optical modes in periodic structures can lead to greatly enhanced light–matter interactions. A logical next step is thus to create planar circuits that act as both photonic and phononic crystals: optomechanical crystals. Here we describe the design, fabrication and characterization of a planar, silicon-chip-based optomechanical crystal capable of co-localizing and strongly coupling 200-terahertz photons and 2-gigahertz phonons. These planar optomechanical crystals bring the powerful techniques of optics and photonic crystals to bear on phononic crystals, providing exquisitely sensitive (near quantum-limited), optical measurements of mechanical vibrations, while simultaneously providing strong nonlinear interactions for optics in a large and technologically relevant range of frequencies.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11565c68d23d9d2258191df9c3c951d5281b9b00

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Citations in the corpus

Optomechanical creation of magnetic fields for photons on a lattice (2015, background): “Two-dimensional (2D) optomechanical crystals with both photonic and phononic bandgaps [2] can be fabricated by standard microfabrication techniques through the lithographic patterning, plasma etching, and release of a thin-film material [3].”
Controlling phonons and photons at the wavelength scale: integrated photonics meets integrated phononics (2018, background): “This led to the demonstration of optomechanical crystals that 3D-confine both photons and gigahertz phonons to a wavelength-scale suspended silicon nanobeams [40, 51, 52].”
Tailoring Structure‐Borne Sound through Bandgap Engineering in Phononic Crystals and Metamaterials: A Comprehensive Review (2022, background): “[132,133] conducted a series of experiments where they designed and fabricated a one-dimensional micro-optomechanical crystal, with a periodicity of 362 nm, endowed with a well-tailored cavity for strong co-localization of 200 THz photons and 2 GHz phonons.”
Slowing and stopping light using an optomechanical crystal array (2010, methodology): “o rst order in ^xusing a variant of the FeynmanHellman perturbation theory, the Johnson perturbation theory [38], which has been used successfully in the past to model optomechanical crystal cavities [9, 39]. The Hamiltonian is then given to rst order by H^ ~! o^a : ^a ~! m ^b: ^b ~gp ^b: ^bq ^a: ^”
Generalized non-reciprocity in an optomechanical circuit via synthetic magnetism and reservoir engineering (2016, neutral): “circuit via synthetic magnetism and reservoir engineering”