No Arabic abstract
Lasers differ from other light sources in that they are coherent, and their coherence makes them indispensable to both fundamental research and practical application. In optomechanical cavities, phonon and photon lasing is facilitated by the ability of photons and phonons to interact intensively and excite one another coherently. The lasing linewidths of both phonons and photons are critical for practical application. However, thus far, these linewidths have not been explored in detail in cavity optomechanical systems. This study investigates the underlying dynamics of lasing in optomechanical cavities and experimentally demonstrates simultaneous photon and phonon lasing with narrow linewidths in a silicon optomechanical crystal cavity. We find that the linewidths can be accounted for by two distinct physical mechanisms in two regimes, namely the normal regime and the reversed regime, where the intrinsic optical decay rate is either larger or smaller than the intrinsic mechanical decay rate. In the normal regime, an ultra-narrow spectral linewidth of 5.4 kHz for phonon lasing at 6.22 GHz can be achieved regardless of the linewidth of the pump light, while these results are counterintuitively unattainable for photon lasing in the reversed regime. These results pave the way towards harnessing the coherence of both photons and phonons in silicon photonic devices and reshaping their spectra, potentially opening up new technologies in sensing, metrology, spectroscopy, and signal processing, as well as in applications requiring sources that offer an ultra-high degree of coherence.
Optomechanical structures are well suited to study photon-phonon interactions, and they also turn out to be potential building blocks for phononic circuits and quantum computing. In phononic circuits, in which information is carried and processed by phonons, optomechanical structures could be used as interfaces to photons and electrons thanks to their excellent coupling efficiency. Among the components required for phononic circuits, such structures could be used to create coherent phonon sources and detectors. Complex functions other than emission or detection remain challenging and addressing a single structure in a full network proves a formidable challenge. Here, we propose and demonstrate a way to modulate the coherent emission from optomechanical crystals by external optical pumping, effectively creating a phonon switch working at ambient conditions of pressure and temperature and the working speed of which (5 MHz) is only limited by the mechanical motion of the optomechanical structure. We additionally demonstrate two other switching schemes: harmonic switching in which the mechanical mode remains active but different harmonics of the optical force are used, and switching to- and from the chaotic regime. Furthermore, the method presented here allows to select any single structure without affecting its surroundings, which is an important step towards freely controllable networks of optomechanical phonon emitters.
Silicon on insulator photonics has offered a versatile platform for the recent development of integrated optomechanical circuits. However, there are some constraints such as the high cost of the wafers and limitation to a single physical device level. In the present work we investigate nanocrystalline silicon as an alternative material for optomechanical devices. In particular, we demonstrate that optomechanical crystal cavities fabricated of nanocrystalline silicon have optical and mechanical properties enabling non-linear dynamical behaviour and effects such as thermo-optic/free-carrier-dispersion self-pulsing, phonon lasing and chaos, all at low input laser power and with typical frequencies as high as 0.3 GHz.
We study theoretically interaction of optically-pumped excitons with acoustic waves in planar semiconductor nanostructures in the strongly nonlinear regime. We start with the multimode optomechanical lasing regime for optical pump frequency {above} the exciton resonance and demonstrate broadband chaotic-like lasing spectra. We also predict formation of propagating optomechanical domain walls driven by optomechanical nonlinearity for the optical pump {below} the exciton resonance. Stability conditions for the domain walls are examined analytically and are in agreement with direct numerical simulations. Our results apply to nonlinear sound propagation in the arrays of quantum wells or in the plane of Bragg semiconductor microcavities hosting excitonic polaritons.
In the field of cavity optomechanics, proposals for quantum nondemolition (QND) measurements of phonon number provide a promising avenue by which one can study the quantum nature of nanoscale mechanical resonators. Here, we investigate these QND measurements for an optomechanical system whereby quadratic coupling arises due to shared symmetries between a single optical resonance and a mechanical mode. We establish a relaxed limit on the amount of linear coupling that can exist in this type of system while still allowing for a QND measurement of Fock states. This new condition enables optomechanical QND measurements, which can be used to probe the decoherence of mesoscopic mechanical Fock states, providing an experimental testbed for quantum collapse theories.
We introduce a class of unidirectional lasing modes associated with the frozen mode regime of non-reciprocal slow-wave structures. Such asymmetric modes can only exist in cavities with broken time-reversal and space inversion symmetries. Their lasing frequency coincides with a spectral stationary inflection point of the underlying passive structure and is virtually independent of its size. These unidirectional lasers can be indispensable components of photonic integrated circuitry.