Time-reversal symmetry breaking with acoustic pumping of nanophotonic circuits

By Donggyu B. Sohn, Seunghwi Kim, Gaurav Bahl. 2017

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Achieving non-reciprocal light propagation via stimuli that break time-reversal symmetry, without magneto-optics, remains a major challenge for integrated nanophotonic devices. Recently, optomechanical microsystems in which light and vibrational modes are coupled through ponderomotive forces have demonstrated strong non-reciprocal effects through a variety of techniques, but always using optical pumping. None of these approaches has demonstrated bandwidth exceeding that of the mechanical system, and all of them require optical power; these are both fundamental and practical issues. Here, we resolve both challenges by breaking time-reversal symmetry using a two-dimensional acoustic pump that simultaneously provides a non-zero overlap integral for light–sound interaction and also satisfies the necessary phase-matching. We use this technique to produce a non-reciprocal modulator (a frequency shifting isolator) by means of indirect interband scattering. We demonstrate mode conversion asymmetry up to 15 dB and efficiency as high as 17% over a bandwidth exceeding 1 GHz.Time-reversal symmetry is broken via an acoustic pumping scheme enabling demonstration of a frequency shifting optical isolator with 15 dB asymmetry and 1 GHz bandwidth.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/46e5e3ca413ff32f32049e50b6694410dc72a39a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, background): “The use of acoustic pumping has also been proposed as an avenue to break TRS in nanophotonic platforms with GHz bandwidths, achieving non-reciprocal propagation without magneto-optics [170].”
The 2019 surface acoustic waves roadmap (2019, background): “Piezoelectric cavity optomechanical systems [109–113] have illustrated the coherent interplay of the RF, acoustic, and optical fields, and new contexts in which this can be valuable, such as non-reciprocal optical systems, continue to be explored [114].”