Raphael van Laer, Photonic Research Group, Ghent University, Belgium
The century-old study of photon-phonon coupling has seen unprecedented activity in the last decade. Driven by early observations of dynamical back-action, the field of cavity optomechanics advanced to ground-state cooling of mesoscopic mechanical oscillators and the counting of individual phonons. Circuit optomechanics, by contrast, exploits wideband photonic-phononic waveguides – in which light and sound can be interconverted, mixed and routed non-locally. Rapid progress is currently made on integrated silicon waveguides, where nanoscale optoacoustic confinement drastically enhances the interaction efficiency. This talk focuses on silicon chips for traveling-wave optomechanics – at the same time exploring analogies with systems such as cold atom clouds, plasmonic Raman cavities and dual-web fibers.
