A picogram- and nanometre-scale photonic-crystal optomechanical cavity

By M. Eichenfield, R. Camacho, J. Chan, Kerry J. Vahala, Oskar J. Painter. Nature, 2008

707 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The dynamic back-action caused by electromagnetic forces (radiation pressure) in optical and microwave cavities is of growing interest. Back-action cooling, for example, is being pursued as a means of achieving the quantum ground state of macroscopic mechanical oscillators. Work in the optical domain has revolved around millimetre- or micrometre-scale structures using the radiation pressure force. By comparison, in microwave devices, low-loss superconducting structures have been used for gradient-force-mediated coupling to a nanomechanical oscillator of picogram mass. Here we describe measurements of an optical system consisting of a pair of specially patterned nanoscale beams in which optical and mechanical energies are simultaneously localized to a cubic-micron-scale volume, and for which large per-photon optical gradient forces are realized. The resulting scale of the per-photon force and the mass of the structure enable the exploration of cavity optomechanical regimes in which, for example, the mechanical rigidity of the structure is dominantly provided by the internal light field itself. In addition to precision measurement and sensitive force detection, nano-optomechanics may find application in reconfigurable and tunable photonic systems, light-based radio-frequency communication and the generation of giant optical nonlinearities for wavelength conversion and optical buffering.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b6825e4ba626939442a0ddcb51f56cc963e9c61

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Near-field cavity optomechanics with nanomechanical oscillators (2009, background): “Purely dispersive radiation-pressure coupling to the nanomechanical strings is observed and allows sub-fm Hz −1/2 displacement imprecision (at room temperature), equal to the SQL, which previously has not been possibl”
Optomechanical device actuation through the optical gradient force (2010, background): “From equations (2) and (3) one can derive that an effective optical string constant is introduced, which depends on the wavelength detuning from the cavity resonance and is proportional to g 2 om P i , where P i is the power injected in the cavit”
Aluminum nitride as a new material for chip-scale optomechanics and nonlinear optics (2012, methodology): “ two design strategies: microring resonators and photonic crystal cavities. Both types of cavities have been widely used in cavity optomechanical systems made from silicon [5, 25] and silicon nitride [26, 27]. When coupled to nanophotonic waveguides, these designs can be conveniently analyzed in int”