Polarization-Controlled Coherent Phonon Generation in Acousto-Plasmonic Metasurfaces

Abstract

Acoustic vibrations at the nanoscale (GHz-THz frequencies) and their interactions with electrons, photons and other excitations are the heart of an emerging field in physics: nanophononics. The design of ultrahigh frequency acoustic-phonon transducers, with tunable frequency, and easy to integrate in complex systems is still an open and challenging problem for the development of acoustic nanoscopies and phonon lasers. Here we show how an optimized plasmonic metasurface can act as a high-frequency phonon transducer. We report pump-probe experiments in metasurfaces composed of an array of gold nanostructures, revealing that such arrays can act as efficient and tunable photon-phonon transducers, with a strong spectral dependence on the excitation rate and laser polarization. We anticipate our work to be the starting point for the engineering of phononic metasurfaces based on plasmonic nanostructures.

arXiv comment7 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The marriage of plasmonics, magnetism, acoustics and ultrafast optics
• Optomechanical properties of GaAs/AlAs micropillar resonators operating in the 18 GHz range
• Ultrafast Acousto-Plasmonics in Gold Nanoparticles Superlattice
• Gigahertz optomechanical modulation by split-ring-resonator nanophotonic meta-atom arrays

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Strong Coupling of Coherent Phonons to Excitons in Semiconducting Monolayer MoTe${}_2$
• Coherent generation and detection of acoustic phonons in topological nanocavities
• Mesoporous Thin-Films for Acoustic Devices in the Gigahertz Range
• Elliptical micropillars for efficient generation and detection of coherent acoustic phonons