Making light jump
Photonic crystals on trampoline membranes for optomechanics experiments
Joâo Pinto Moura (TU Delft - QN/Groeblacher Lab)
Herre van der Zant – Promotor (TU Delft - QN/van der Zant Lab)
Simon Groeblacher – Copromotor (TU Delft - QN/Groeblacher Lab)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Cavity optomechanics studies the interaction between mechanical resonators and optical cavities through radiation pressure forces and aims to harness this interaction for applications in the areas of high precision metrology, tests of fundamental quantum mechanics, or quantum information processing. For the most ambitious of these applications it is necessary that the mechanical resonator has a sufficiently high mechanical quality factor such that it can undergo at least a few coherent oscillations before interacting with incoherent thermal phonons. Furthermore, the optomechanical coupling must be large enough to make the interaction between optics and mechanics probable and, ideally, deterministic.
This work pursues both goals using a thin membrane in the middle (MIM) of an optical cavity. This is a common configuration in cavity optomechanics but most experiments to date have lowmechanical quality factors and optomechanical couplings.