| AVS 64th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Nanometer-scale Science and Technology Division | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session NS+EM+MN+PS+SS-TuA |
| Session: | Nano-Photonics, Plasmonics and Mechanics |
| Presenter: | Vladimir A. Aksyuk, NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology |
| Authors: | V.A. Aksyuk, NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology S. An, NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology B. Dennis, Rutgers University and NIST CNST T. Michels, NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology B.J. Roxworthy, NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology J. Zou, NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Devices controlling light via mechanical motion are ubiquitous, from a simple camera’s zoom lens to arrays of moving mirrors correcting for atmospheric distortions in telescopes and digitally projecting movies on the cinema screens. The same optomechanical coupling provides one of the best known techniques for measuring mechanical motion, covering length scales form atomic force microscopy to kilometer scale LIGO interferometers to the red shift measurements over billions of light years. We study optomechanical coupling in micro and nanoscale systems that combine electromechanics with photonics and plasmonics, and apply such chip based optomechanical transducers to solve nanoscale measurement problems. In one example, integrated cavity-optomechanical sensing breaks the common trade-off between sensitivity and bandwidth in atomic force microscopy, allowing extremely low noise motion readout of very fast, nanoscale/picogram mechanical probes. Reducing the probe size not only increases the transduction bandwidth, but also reduces drag and therefore the fundamental thermodynamic force noise when operating in air. Even though the cantilever crossection is much smaller than the optical wavelength, the near-filed coupled high quality factor photonic cavity makes our motion readout exquisitely sensitive. As a second example, I will discuss nanomechanical plasmonic systems, where extreme confinement of the gap plasmon optical modes leads to some of the largest optomechanical coupling coefficients ever observed. I will present electro-mechanical gap plasmon phase modulators and nanomechanically tunable deep subwavelength gap plasmon resonators with potential applications for motion metrology, novel nanoscale sensing and signal transduction and arbitrary wavefront control via nanoelectromechanically tunable optical metasurfaces.