Optomechanical creation of magnetic fields for photons on a lattice
By M. Schmidt, Stefan Kessler, V. Peano, Oskar J. Painter, Florian Marquardt. 2015
152 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recently, there has been growing interest in the creation of artificial magnetic fields for uncharged particles, such as cold atoms or photons. These efforts are partly motivated by the resulting desirable features, such as transport along edge states that is robust against backscattering. We analyze how the optomechanical interaction between photons and mechanical vibrations can be used to create artificial magnetic fields for photons on a lattice. The ingredients required are an optomechanical crystal, i.e., a free-standing photonic crystal with localized vibrational and optical modes, and two laser beams with the right pattern of phases. One of the two schemes analyzed here is based on optomechanical modulation of the links between optical modes, while the other is a lattice extension of optomechanical wavelength-conversion setups. We analyze both schemes theoretically and present numerical simulations of the resulting optical spectrum, photon transport in the presence of an artificial Lorentz force, edge states, and the photonic Aharonov–Bohm effect. We discuss the requirements for experimental realizations. Finally, we analyze the completely general situation of an optomechanical system subject to an arbitrary optical phase pattern and conclude that it is best described in terms of gauge fields acting in synthetic dimensions. In contrast to existing nonoptomechanical approaches, the schemes analyzed here are very versatile, since they can be controlled fully optically, allowing for time-dependent in situ tunability without the need for individual electrical addressing of localized optical modes.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d6356c9e0bb8d289f2f7629f289f81246d31382
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Citations in the corpus
- Optical transduction and routing of microwave phonons in cavity-optomechanical circuits (2016, background): “From a fit of the model to the measured pulsed response, the extrinsic mechanical cavity-towaveguide coupling rate is estimated to be γeL(R)/2π = 35 (26) MHz for the L (R) cavity, corresponding to an internal efficiency of phonon transmission from cavity L to R of 89% (67%) excluding (including) pho”
- Topological photonics (2018, background): “This was followed by a proposal in optomechanics (Schmidt et al., 2015), in which photon and phonon degrees of freedom were considered as two lattice sites along the synthetic dimension.”
- Generalized non-reciprocity in an optomechanical circuit via synthetic magnetism and reservoir engineering (2016, background): “Predicted effects include the formation of back-scattering immune photonic [1] and phononic [20] chiral edge states, topologically nontrivial phases of hybrid photon-phonon excitations [20], dynamical gauge fields [40], and, in the case of non-particle-conserving interactions enabled by bluedetuned ”
- Synthetic dimensions in integrated photonics: From optical isolation to four-dimensional quantum Hall physics (2015, background): “First, there have been two previous proposals that describe how a synthetic dimension may be introduced into a photonics system [27,28].”
- Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “The concept of synthetic dimensions was also introduced for photonic systems using orbital angular momentum states [235], higher modes in an optical ring-resonator array [236,237] and optomechanical systems [238].”