Thermal Brillouin noise observed in silicon optomechanical waveguide

Abstract

Stimulated Brillouin scattering was recently observed in nanoscale silicon waveguides. Surprisingly, thermally-driven photon-phonon conversion in these structures had not yet been reported. Here, we inject an optical probe in a suspended silicon waveguide and measure its phase fluctuations at the output. We observe mechanical resonances around 8 GHz with a scattering efficiency of $10^{-5}{\text{m}}^{-1}$ and a signal-to-noise ratio of 2. The observations are in agreement with a theory of noise in these waveguides as well as with stimulated measurements. Our scheme may simplify measurements of mechanical signatures in nanoscale waveguides and is a step towards a better grasp of thermal noise in these new continuum optomechanical systems.

11 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Interaction between light and highly confined hypersound in a silicon photonic nanowire
• Brillouin Lasing with a CaF_2 Whispering Gallery Mode Resonator
• Control of coherent information via on chip photonic-phononic emitter-receivers
• Optomechanical Multi-Mode Hamiltonian for Nanophotonic Waveguides

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Optomechanical cooling in a continuous system
• Perspectives on high-frequency nanomechanics, nanoacoustics, and nanophononics
• Electrical driving of X-band mechanical waves in a silicon photonic circuit
• Nonlinear Quantum Optics in Optomechanical Nanoscale Waveguides
• Photon and Phonon Spectral-Functions for Continuum Quantum Optomechanics
• Squeezed States of Coupled Photons and Phonons in Nanoscale Waveguides
• Entangled Photons and Phonons via Inter-Modal Brillouin Scattering
• Slow Light through Brillouin Scattering in Continuum Quantum Optomechanics