The act of position measurement alters the motion of an object being measured. This quantum measurement backaction is typically much smaller than the thermal motion of a room-temperature object and thus difficult to observe. By shining laser light through a nanomechanical beam, we measure the beam's thermally driven vibrations and perturb its motion with optical force fluctuations at a level dictated by the Heisenberg measurement-disturbance uncertainty relation. We demonstrate a cross-correlation technique to distinguish optically driven motion from thermally driven motion, observing this quantum backaction signature up to room temperature. We use the scale of the quantum correlations, which is determined by fundamental constants, to gauge the size of thermal motion, demonstrating a path toward absolute thermometry with quantum mechanically calibrated ticks.
Cavity optomechanical systems are being studied for their potential in areas such as metrology, communications, and quantum information science. For a number of recently proposed applications in which multiple optical and mechanical modes interact, an outstanding challenge is to develop multimode architectures that allow flexibility in the optical and mechanical sub-system designs while maintaining the strong interactions that have been demonstrated in single-mode systems. To that end, we demonstrate slot-mode optomechanical crystals, devices in which photonic and phononic crystal nanobeams separated by a narrow slot are coupled via optomechanical interactions. These nanobeam pairs are patterned to confine a mechanical breathing mode at the center of one beam and a low-loss optical mode in the slot between the beams. This architecture affords great design flexibility towards multimode optomechanics, as well as substantial optomechanical coupling rates. We show this by producing slot-mode devices in stoichiometric Si3N4, with optical modes in the 980 nm band coupled to mechanical modes at 3.4 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 400 MHz. We exploit the Si3N4 tensile stress to achieve slot widths down to 24 nm, which leads to enhanced optomechanical coupling, sufficient for the observation of optomechanical self-oscillations at all studied frequencies. We then develop multimode optomechanical systems with triple-beam geometries, in which two optical modes couple to a single mechanical mode, and two mechanical modes couple to a single optical mode. Taken together, these results demonstrate great flexibility in the design of multimode chip-scale optomechanical systems with large optomechanical coupling.
Optical-fi ber-based, hollow-core waveguides (HCWs) have opened up many new applications in laser surgery, gas sensors, and non-linear optics. Chip-scale HCWs are desirable because they are compact, light-weight and can be integrated with other devices into systems-on-a-chip. However, their progress has been hindered by the lack of a low loss waveguide architecture. Here, a completely new waveguiding concept is demonstrated using two planar, parallel, silicon-on-insulator wafers with high-contrast subwavelength gratings to refl ect light in-between. We report a record low optical loss of 0.37 dB/cm for a 9-µ m waveguide, mode-matched to a single mode fi ber. Two-dimensional light confi nement is experimentally realized without sidewalls in the HCWs, which is promising for ultrafast sensing response with nearly instantaneous fl ow of gases or fl uids. This unique waveguide geometry establishes an entirely new scheme for low-cost chip-scale sensor arrays and lab-on-a-chip applications.Keywords: hollow-core waveguide; high-contrast subwavelength grating; gas-sensing; silicon photonics.Conventional light guiding is achieved in a geometry where a high-refractive-index core is surrounded by a low-refractiveindex cladding. In the past decade, the opposite schemeguiding light through a low-index core surrounded by high-index cladding layers has emerged as a new tool for applications. In particular, hollow-core optical waveguides/fi bers are desirable for gas sensors and gas-based non-linear optics because of the increased lengths for light-matter interaction [1,2] , and for laser surgery to guide light in mid-to far-infrared wavelength regimes that lack low-absorption materials [3,4] . Chip-scale hollow-core waveguides (HCWs) are desirable because they enable cost-effective manufacturing of on-chip systems with the potential to monolithically integrate light sources, detectors and electronics. Chip-scale HCWs have been reported using metal [5] , distributed Bragg refl ectors [6,7] and anti-resonant refl ection layers [8,9] as the guiding refl ectors. However, their use is limited due to large optical losses because of insuffi cient refl ection.A hollow-core waveguide is best understood by the ray optics model, with an optical beam guided by zig-zag refl ections from the guiding walls [6,7,10] . The propagation loss is strongly dependent on the refl ectivity of the walls [6,7,10] due to the large number of refl ections for a given length (the number of refl ections is L λ /2 d 2 , where L is the length of the waveguide, d is the waveguide core height and λ is the wavelength of light used). Low losses can be obtained for HCW with core size in the tens of µ m [7] . However, a core of this size does not lend itself to a low bending loss or effi cient fi ber coupling. High-contrast subwavelength gratings (HCGs) have been found to offer very high refl ection for surface-normal incident light [11 -14] . Recently, we reported numerical simulation results of a one-dimensional (1D) waveguide guided by two parallel layers...
Nanobeam optomechanical crystals, in which localized GHz frequency mechanical modes are coupled to wavelength-scale optical modes, are being employed in a variety of experiments across different material platforms. Here, we demonstrate the electrostatic tuning and stabilization of such devices, by integrating a Si 3 N 4 slot-mode optomechanical crystal cavity with a nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) element, which controls the displacement of an additional "tuning" beam within the optical near-field of the optomechanical cavity. Under DC operation, tuning of the optical cavity wavelength across several optical linewidths with little degradation of the optical quality factor (Q ≈ 10 5 ) is observed. The AC response of the tuning mechanism is measured, revealing actuator resonance frequencies in the 10 MHz to 20 MHz range, consistent with the predictions from simulations. Feedback control of the optical mode resonance frequency is demonstrated, and alternative actuator geometries are presented.
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