Self-alignment of glass fiber nanospike by optomechanical back-action in hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

A topic of great current interest is the harnessing and enhancement of optical tweezer forces for trapping small objects of different sizes and shapes at relatively small powers. Here we demonstrate the stable trapping, inside the core of a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF), of a mechanically compliant fused silica nanospike, formed by tapering a single-mode fiber (SMF). The nanospike is subwavelength in diameter over its similar to W50 mu m insertion length in the HC-PCF. Laser light, launched into the SMF core, adiabatically evolves into a mode that extends strongly into the space surrounding the nanospike. It then senses the presence of the hollow core, and the resulting optomechanical action and back-action results in a strong trapping force at the core center. The system permits lens-less, reflection-free, self-stabilized, and self-aligned coupling from SMF to HC-PCF with a demonstrated efficiency of 87.8%. The unique configuration also provides an elegant means of investigating optomechanical effects in optical tweezers, especially at very low pressures. (C) 2016 Optical Society of Americ

Optical Trapping and Manipulation Using Optical Fibers

“…The nanospike was fashioned by thermally tapering a SMF down to tip with dimensions smaller than the wavelength. The centripetal optical force stabilizes the nanospike precisely at the center of the hollow-core, allowing for nearly perfect light coupling between the SMF and HC-PCF [137][138][139]. What makes this work especially attractive is that the interaction between the nanospike and the HC-PCF is reported to be self-induced, very similar to the SIBA trap introduced previously.…”

“…Remote sensing of electric field, temperature and irradiation was demonstrated using charged particles and fluorescent particles respectively with a spatial resolution down to tens [136], © 2018 Springer Nature; e, Ref. [137], © 2016 OSA of microns [128,131,132]. In this scheme, the trapped particle responds locally to the sensing quantities when it is passing through the region of interest and, determined by the particle's properties, it can react in different degrees of freedom including transverse motion, variations in speed, fluorescence radiation, etc.…”

“…Furthermore, when the hollow core is evacuated to a low pressure, the trapped nanospikes is able to resonate at a high Q-factor, makes the HC-PCF system a unique platform for optomechanical dynamics researches ( Fig. 11d, e) [137,140].…”

Dissipative optomechanical cooling of a glass-fiber nanospike coupled to a bottle resonator

“…Despite great efforts to engineer optomechanical interactions in this configuration [18,20,21,22], the poor mechanical properties of the waveguides have prohibited demonstration of dissipative cooling. Recently we reported that an appropriately tapered glass-fibre nanospike can provide both adiabatic guidance of light and low-frequency flexural resonances with quality factors Q > 10 5 [6,23]. In this paper we show that these unique optical and mechanical properties allow passive cooling of the mechanical motion of the waveguide via dissipative optomechanical interactions with a neighbouring WGM resonator.…”

Self-Injection Locking of a Distributed Feedback Laser Diode Using a High-Finesse Fabry-Perot Microcavity

“…Optical microcavities are important for optical integration in practical applications [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Among them, Fabry-Perot microcavities (FPMC) are relatively simple to fabricate with high finesse [10][11][12], which is important for nonlinear optics applications, e.g., second-harmonic generation [12][13][14][15][16], parametric amplification [17][18][19], frequency-comb generation [20], and entangled photon generation [21].…”