No Arabic abstract
A fully planar two-dimensional optomechanical crystal formed in a silicon microchip is used to create a structure devoid of phonons in the GHz frequency range. A nanoscale photonic crystal cavity is placed inside the phononic bandgap crystal in order to probe the properties of the localized acoustic modes. By studying the trends in mechanical damping, mode density, and optomechanical coupling strength of the acoustic resonances over an array of structures with varying geometric properties, clear evidence of a complete phononic bandgap is shown.
Recent years have witnessed the boom of cavity optomechanics, which exploits the confinement and coupling of optical and mechanical waves at the nanoscale. Amongst their physical implementations, optomechanical (OM) crystals built on semiconductor slabs enable the integration and manipulation of multiple OM elements in a single chip and provide GHz phonons suitable for coherent phonon manipulation. Different demonstrations of coupling of infrared photons and GHz phonons in cavities created by inserting defects on OM crystals have been performed. However, the considered structures do not show a complete phononic bandgap, which should allow longer dephasing time, since acoustic leakage is minimized. We demonstrate the excitation of acoustic modes in a 1D OM crystal properly designed to display a full phononic bandgap for acoustic modes at 4 GHz. The modes inside the complete bandgap are designed to have mechanical Q factors above 10e8 and invariant to fabrication imperfections.
A gyroid structure is a distinct morphology that is triply periodic and consists of minimal isosurfaces containing no straight lines. We have designed and synthesized amorphous silicon (a-Si) mid-infrared gyroid photonic crystals that exhibit a complete bandgap in infrared spectroscopy measurements. Photonic crystals were synthesized by deposition of a-Si/Al2O3 coatings onto a sacrificial polymer scaffold defined by two-photon lithography. We observed a 100% reflectance at 7.5 mum for single gyroids with a unit cell size of 4.5 mum, in agreement with the photonic bandgap position predicted from full-wave electromagnetic simulations, whereas the observed reflection peak shifted to 8 um for a 5.5 mum unit cell size. This approach represents a simulation-fabrication-characterization platform to realize three-dimensional gyroid photonic crystals with well-defined dimensions in real space and tailored properties in momentum space.
The design and fabrication of phononic crystals (PnCs) hold the key to control the propagation of heat and sound at the nanoscale. However, there is a lack of experimental studies addressing the impact of order/disorder on the phononic properties of PnCs. Here, we present a comparative investigation of the influence of disorder on the hypersonic and thermal properties of two-dimensional PnCs. PnCs of ordered and disordered lattices are fabricated of circular holes with equal filling fractions in free-standing Si membranes. Ultrafast pump and probe spectroscopy (asynchronous optical sampling) and Raman thermometry based on a novel two-laser approach are used to study the phononic properties in the gigahertz (GHz) and terahertz (THz) regime, respectively. Finite element method simulations of the phonon dispersion relation and three-dimensional displacement fields furthermore enable the unique identification of the different hypersonic vibrations. The increase of surface roughness and the introduction of short-range disorder are shown to modify the phonon dispersion and phonon coherence in the hypersonic (GHz) range without affecting the room-temperature thermal conductivity. On the basis of these findings, we suggest a criteria for predicting phonon coherence as a function of roughness and disorder.
We present the observation of a complete bandgap and collective spin wave excitation in two-dimensional magnonic crystals comprised of arrays of nanoscale antidots and nanodots, respectively. Considering that the frequencies dealt with here fall in the microwave band, these findings can be used for the development of suitable magnonic metamaterials and spin wave based signal processing. We also present the application of a numerical procedure, to compute the dispersion relations of spin waves for any high symmetry direction in the first Brillouin zone. The results obtained from this procedure has been reproduced and verified by the well established plane wave method for an antidot lattice, when magnetization dynamics at antidot boundaries is pinned. The micromagnetic simulation based method can also be used to obtain iso--frequency countours of spin waves. Iso--frequency contours are analougous of the Fermi surfaces and hence, they have the potential to radicalize our understanding of spin wave dynamics. The physical origin of bands, partial and full magnonic bandgaps has been explained by plotting the spatial distribution of spin wave energy spectral density. Although, unfettered by rigid assumptions and approximations, which afflict most analytical methods used in the study of spin wave dynamics, micromagnetic simulations tend to be computationally demanding. Thus, the observation of collective spin wave excitation in the case of nanodot arrays, which can obviate the need to perform simulations may also prove to be valuable.
Nanomechanical resonators have demonstrated great potential for use as versatile tools in a number of emerging quantum technologies. For such applications, the performance of these systems is restricted by the decoherence of their fragile quantum states, necessitating a thorough understanding of their dissipative coupling to the surrounding environment. In bulk amorphous solids, these dissipation channels are dominated at low temperatures by parasitic coupling to intrinsic two-level system (TLS) defects, however, there remains a disconnect between theory and experiment on how this damping manifests in dimensionally-reduced nanomechanical resonators. Here, we present an optomechanically-mediated thermal ringdown technique, which we use to perform simultaneous measurements of the dissipation in four mechanical modes of a cryogenically-cooled silicon nanoresonator, with resonant frequencies ranging from 3 - 19 MHz. Analyzing the devices mechanical damping rate at fridge temperatures between 10 mK - 10 K, we demonstrate quantitative agreement with the standard tunneling model for TLS ensembles confined to one dimension. From these fits, we extract the defect density of states ($P_0 sim$ 1 - 4 $times$ 10$^{44}$ J$^{-1}$ m$^{-3}$) and deformation potentials ($gamma sim$ 1 - 2 eV), showing that each mechanical mode couples on average to less than a single thermally-active defect at 10 mK.