Optical circulation in a multimode optomechanical resonator

Abstract

Breaking the symmetry of electromagnetic wave propagation enables important technological functionality. In particular, circulators are nonreciprocal components that can route photons directionally in classical or quantum photonic circuits and offer prospects for fundamental research on electromagnetic transport. Developing highly efficient circulators thus presents an important challenge, especially to realise compact reconfigurable implementations that do not rely on magnetic fields to break reciprocity. We demonstrate optical circulation utilising radiation pressure interactions in an on-chip multimode optomechanical system. Mechanically mediated optical mode conversion in a silica microtoroid provides a synthetic gauge bias for light, enabling four-port circulation that exploits tailored interference between appropriate light paths. We identify two sideband conditions under which ideal circulation is approached. This allows to experimentally demonstrate ~10 dB isolation and <3 dB insertion loss in all relevant channels. We show the possibility of actively controlling the circulator properties, enabling ideal opportunities for reconfigurable integrated nanophotonic circuits.

Nonlinear dynamics of weakly dissipative optomechanical systems

“…The limit tori can be also found in the red detuned region, but they are rather rare there. Figure 6(a) shows how a quasiperiodic orbit appears and disappears when the detuning is changed adiabatically 10 . We have plotted the spectrum of the position of the mechanical oscillator when the OM system is close to some attractor.…”

“…Panel(c): zoom of the area within the black box in panel(b). 10 Adiabatic change here means that the detuning was changed very slowly, such that if the system is initially close to some attractor, it remains close to it. 11 The presence of the secondary peaks does not necessarily imply that the attractor is a torus.…”

“…For an extended review we refer the reader to [1]. In the past few years, a range of impressive achievements has been observed, which includes topological transport in optomechanical arrays [4,5], the engineering of nonreciprocal interactions [6][7][8][9][10][11], the generation of single phonon states using optical control [12], the generation of mechanical squeezed states [13], measurement-based quantum control of mechanical motion [14], conversion of quantum information to mechanical motion [15], conversion between light in the microwave and optical range [16], single photon frequency shifters [17], force measurements using cold-atom optomechanics [18], and the use of unconventional mechanical modes, like high frequency bulk modes of crystals [19], multilayer graphene [20], and the modes of superfluid helium [21].…”

Realization of Directional Amplification in a Microwave Optomechanical Device

“…An independently measured contribution by noise in the recorded frequencyconverting response is subtracted to yield the pure transfer coefficients as explained in Appendix D. The pump and probe efficiencies around the cavity frequencies are determined by measuring a large frequency span around the cavities (see Fig. 2a) and used to calibrate the transfer parameters of the amplifier following the method discussed Appendix E. |S | (dB) 12 |S | (dB) 21 10 dB 0 Detuning (MHz) Detuning (kHz) |S | (dB) 12 5 0 -5…”

“…Based on a slightly different mechanism where counterpropagating optical modes in micro-spheres, -rings or -toroids face different optomechanically-induced transparencies or amplifications, optomechanically-induced * laure.mercierdelepinay@aalto.fi nonreciprocity [17] led to a variety of realizations of isolators, circulators and directional amplifiers in the optical domain [18][19][20][21]. Even more recently, another route using suitably coupled multimode optomechanical systems [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] has been investigated.…”