Optomechanical antennas for on-chip beam-steering

Abstract

Rapid and low-power control over the direction of a radiating light field is a major challenge in photonics and a key enabling technology for emerging sensors and free-space communication links. Current approaches based on bulky motorized components are limited by their high cost and power consumption, while on-chip optical phased arrays face challenges in scaling and programmability. Here, we propose a solid-state approach to beam-steering using optomechanical antennas. We combine recent progress in simultaneous control of optical and mechanical waves with remarkable advances in on-chip optical phased arrays to enable low-power and full two-dimensional beam-steering of monochromatic light. We present a design of a silicon photonic system made of photonic-phononic waveguides that achieves 44${}^{\circ }$ field of view with $880$ resolvable spots by sweeping the mechanical wavelength with about a milliwatt of mechanical power. Using mechanical waves as nonreciprocal, active gratings allows us to quickly reconfigure the beam direction, beam shape, and the number of beams. It also enables us to distinguish between light that we send and receive.

15 pages, 17 figures; the first two authors contributed equally to this work

References in corpus (5)

• Interaction between light and highly confined hypersound in a silicon photonic nanowire
• Large Brillouin Amplification in Silicon
• Net on-chip Brillouin gain based on suspended silicon nanowires
• Unifying Brillouin scattering and cavity optomechanics
• Brillouin resonance broadening due to structural variations in nanoscale waveguides

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Electrically-driven Acousto-optics and Broadband Non-reciprocity in Silicon Photonics
• Controlling phonons and photons at the wavelength-scale: silicon photonics meets silicon phononics
• Gigahertz phononic integrated circuits on thin-film lithium niobate on sapphire
• Integrated Nonreciprocal Photonic Devices with Dynamic Modulation
• Piezoelectric transduction of a wavelength-scale mechanical waveguide
• Design of a release-free piezo-optomechanical quantum transducer
• A Time-of-Flight Imaging System Based on Resonant Photoelastic Modulation
• Multiplexing Guided Optical and Acoustic Waves for Efficient Acousto-Optic Devices