Optomechanics of chiral dielectric metasurfaces

Abstract

Electromagnetic fields coupled with mechanical degrees of freedom have recently shown exceptional and innovative applications, ultimately leading to mesoscopic optomechanical devices operating in the quantum regime of motion. Simultaneously, micromechanical elements have provided new ways to enhance and manipulate the optical properties of passive photonic elements. Following this concept, in this article we show how combining a chiral metasurface with a GaAs suspended micromembrane can offer new scenarios for controlling the polarization state of near-infrared light beams. Starting from the uncommon properties of chiral metasurface to statically realize target polarization states and circular and linear dichroism, we report mechanically induced, ~300 kHz polarization modulation, which favorably compares, in terms of speed, with liquid-crystals commercial devices. Moreover, we demonstrate how the mechanical resonance can be non-trivially affected by the input light polarization (and chiral state) via a thermoelastic effect triggered by intracavity photons. This work inaugurates the field of Polarization Optomechanics, which could pave the way to fast polarimetric devices, polarization modulators and dynamically tunable chiral state generators and detectors, as well as giving access to new form of polarization nonlinearities and control.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Ultra-thin Tunable Optomechanical Metalens
• Optomechanically Induced Birefringence and Faraday Effect
• Optically Active and Nonlinear Chiral Metamaterials
• Optomechanical Modulation Spectroscopy of Bound-States-In-The-Continuum in a dielectric metasurface
• High frequency mechanical excitation of a silicon nanostring with piezoelectric aluminum nitride layers
• High-resolution acoustic field mapping of GHz phononic crystals with atomic force microscopy
• Mechanical mode engineering with orthotropic metamaterial membranes
• Departure from Babinet principle in metasurfaces supported by subwavelength dielectric slabs