Injection locking of an electro-optomechanical device

Abstract

Advances in optomechanics have enabled significant achievements in precision sensing and control of matter, including the detection of gravitational waves and the cooling of mechanical systems to their quantum ground state. Recently, the inherent non-linearity in the optomechanical interaction has been harnessed to explore synchronization effects, including the spontaneous locking of an oscillator to a reference injection signal delivered via the optical field. Here, we present the first demonstration of a radiation-pressure driven optomechanical system locking to an inertial drive, with actuation provided by an integrated electrical interface. We use the injection signal to suppress drift in the optomechanical oscillation frequency, strongly reducing phase noise by over 55 dBc/Hz at 2 Hz offset. We further employ the injection tone to tune the oscillation frequency by more than 2 million times its narrowed linewidth. In addition, we uncover previously unreported synchronization dynamics, enabled by the independence of the inertial drive from the optical drive field. Finally, we show that our approach may enable control of the optomechanical gain competition between different mechanical modes of a single resonator. The electrical interface allows enhanced scalability for future applications involving arrays of injection-locked precision sensors.

Selective and switchable optical amplification with mechanical driven oscillators

“…The cavity is driven by a pump field and a weak probe field. Meanwhile, as also shown in experiments [27,88,89], mechanical driving fields with frequency ω i and phase φ i (i = 1, 2) can be applied to selectively pump the MRs. We note that in the simplest two-mode COM (i.e., without the MR 2 ), pumping the MR 1 leads to a closed-loop ∆-type energy-level structure [see Fig. 1(b)], under which optical properties of the system become highly sensitive to the mechanical pump parameters [78][79][80][81][82][83].…”

Integrated cavity opto-electromechanics: electrical tuning and control of optomechanical systems

“…Refs. [2,31], see Chapter 5). Below we focus on two specific applications in more detail, before presenting the devices which we study in this thesis and a selection of our experimental results.…”

“…In the classical regime, microwave-optical transduction is commonly achieved through electrooptical modulators, which rely on materials that experience large electro-optic effects (Pockels, Kerr and carrier effects [65]) to change the refractive index of the optical mode. Though conversion using these methods can be very fast (tens of Gbit/s [66,67]), its efficiency is fundamentally limited by the electro-optic coefficient of the material, which typically precludes its use in quantum applications 2 .…”

“…An early pioneer of cavity optomechanics from the gravitational wave community was Vladimir Braginsky, who (with his colleagues) published several seminal papers from the late 1960's onwards [104][105][106]. These mainly concerned ponderomotive effects 2 and measurement of small forces in microwave optomechanical systems (also known as electromechanical systems). In the United…”

“…2.2, a reflection of the explosion of variety in optomechanical systems that new technological capabilities have provided. 2 i.e.mechanical displacement resulting from radiation pressure, which can be interpreted as a gradient in the electromagnetic field.…”