Engineering phonon leakage in nanomechanical resonators

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a technique for coupling phonons out of an optomechanical crystal cavity. By designing a perturbation that breaks a symmetry in the elastic structure, we selectively induce phonon leakage without affecting the optical properties. It is shown experimentally via cryogenic measurements that the proposed cavity perturbation causes loss of phonons into mechanical waves on the surface of silicon, while leaving photon lifetimes unaffected. This demonstrates that phonon leakage can be engineered in on-chip optomechanical systems. We experimentally observe large fluctuations in leakage rates that we attribute to fabrication disorder and verify this using simulations. Our technique opens the way to engineering more complex on-chip phonon networks utilizing guided mechanical waves to connect quantum systems.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Proposal for an Optomechanical Traveling Wave Phonon-Photon Translator
• Optimized optomechanical crystal cavity with acoustic radiation shield
• Phonon counting and intensity interferometry of a nanomechanical resonator
• Continuous mode cooling and phonon routers for phononic quantum networks
• Quantum State Transfer via Noisy Photonic and Phononic Waveguides

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Phononic band structure engineering for high-Q gigahertz surface acoustic wave resonators on lithium niobate