Light-Structure Interactions: Opto-Excited Mechanical Vibrations

Postdoctoral Fellow
California Institute of Technology
Optical excitation of the mechanical vibrational mode was recently observed in an on-chip silica cavity with nano-scale accuracy. This opto-mechanical nonlinearity constitutes one of the first interactions of light with structure; and extends phenomena that were formerly known at the molecular level to be also present at the macroscopic scale. Examples for light-structure interactions include our recent observation of Stokes and anti-Stokes lines originating from device vibrations and theoretical predictions (by others) for entanglement of macroscopic objects by the same nonlinearity.