Nanomechanical resonators based on adiabatic periodicity-breaking in a superlattice

Abstract

We propose a novel acoustic cavity design where we confine a mechanical mode by adiabatically changing the acoustic properties of a GaAs/AlAs superlattice. By means of high resolution Raman scattering measurements, we experimentally demonstrate the presence of a confined acoustic mode at a resonance frequency around 350 GHz. We observe an excellent agreement between the experimental data and numerical simulations based on a photoelastic model. We demonstrate that the spatial profile of the confined mode can be tuned by changing the magnitude of the adiabatic deformation, leading to strong variations of its mechanical quality factor and Raman scattering cross section. The reported alternative confinement method could lead to the development of a novel generation of nanophononic and optomechanical systems.

References in corpus (7)

• Laser cooling of a nanomechanical oscillator into its quantum ground state
• Confinement of acoustical vibrations in a semiconductor planar phonon cavity
• Bloch-wave engineering of quantum dot-micropillars for cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments
• Phonon Bloch oscillations in acoustic-cavity structures
• Optomechanical properties of GaAs/AlAs micropillar resonators operating in the 18 GHz range
• Sub-micron diameter micropillar cavities with high Quality factors and ultra-small mode volumes
• Optomechanical coupling in the Anderson-localization regime

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Topological nanophononic states by band inversion
• Brillouin Scattering in Hybrid Optophononic Bragg Micropillar Resonators at 300 GHz
• Coherent generation and detection of acoustic phonons in topological nanocavities
• Phonon engineering with superlattices: generalized nanomechanical potentials
• Long-Lived Coherent Acoustic Phonons in Epitaxially Grown III-V Adiabatic Cavities