Generalized non-reciprocity in an optomechanical circuit via synthetic magnetism and reservoir engineering

By K. Fang, Jie Luo, A. Metelmann, M. Matheny, Florian Marquardt, A. Clerk, Oskar J. Painter. Nature Physics, 2016

478 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Synthetic magnetism has been used to control charge neutral excitations for applications ranging from classical beam steering to quantum simulation. In optomechanics, radiation-pressure-induced parametric coupling between optical (photon) and mechanical (phonon) excitations may be used to break time-reversal symmetry, providing the prerequisite for synthetic magnetism. Here we design and fabricate a silicon optomechanical circuit with both optical and mechanical connectivity between two optomechanical cavities. Driving the two cavities with phase-correlated laser light results in a synthetic magnetic flux, which, in combination with dissipative coupling to the mechanical bath, leads to non-reciprocal transport of photons with 35 dB of isolation. Additionally, optical pumping with blue-detuned light manifests as a particle non-conserving interaction between photons and phonons, resulting in directional optical amplification of 12 dB in the isolator through-direction. These results suggest the possibility of using optomechanical circuits to create a more general class of non-reciprocal optical devices, and further, to enable new topological phases for both light and sound on a microchip. Combining synthetic magnetism and controlled dissipation, researchers created an optomechanical device in which photons and phonons are coupled, enabling non-reciprocal (asymmetric) photon transport and directional amplification.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99b89ec0896c7108a50b747e88f2ea7351a23646

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Topological dissipation in a time-multiplexed photonic resonator network (2021, unknown): “Several recent studies have proposed combining dissipative and conservative couplings to enable time-reversal symmetry-breaking couplings 15 and to induce non-trivial topological invariants 16–20 .”
Spatiotemporal light control with active metasurfaces (2019, methodology): “For example, optical isolation for a nearIR optical signal has been realized by using gigahertz-speed optomechanicalmodulation, operating on a narrow-band optical signal inside a high-quality factor cavity (108).”
Microwave photonics with superconducting quantum circuits (2017, background): “[247], which demonstrated directional amplification and could be extended to a circulator, as well as the microwave optomechanics experiment of Ref.”
Widely Tunable On-Chip Microwave Circulator for Superconducting Quantum Circuits (2017, methodology): “The first of these involves the parametric coupling of resonant modes in the resolved sideband limit, which is a widely used strategy in radio frequency [96, 97], superconducting microwave [82, 98, 99, 100, 101], electroacoustic [102], electromechanical [103, 104, 105], and optomechanical [106, 107]”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “Initial experimental demonstration of such an approach for a few sites was recently reported by Fang et al. (2017).”
Demonstration of Efficient Nonreciprocity in a Microwave Optomechanical Circuit (2017, methodology): “While we have pursued ideal isolation, which preserves quantum signals, the parameters we demonstrate here are also well suited for implementing nonreciprocal amplification schemes [11,15,18,20,25,36].”