Kavli Affiliate: Harry A. Atwater
| First 5 Authors: Lior Michaeli, Lior Michaeli, , ,
| Summary:
We experimentally demonstrate a new class of optomechanical nonlinearities in
weakly damped micromechanical resonators, arising from the interplay between
the Duffing nonlinearity, intermodal coupling, and thermal fluctuations. Within
the bistable regime of a single Duffing mode driven by radiation pressure
forces, we observe stochastically generated sidebands, originating from thermal
fluctuations around equilibrium trajectories in phase space, and exploit these
sidebands to induce probabilistic transitions between bistable states using
weak secondary acoustic excitation. Extending this framework to multimodal
interactions, we show that nonlinear modes coupling within the same resonator
leads to similar transitions due to parametric modulation around the
noise-excited sidebands as a result of frequency mixing. Simultaneously, abrupt
changes in displacements of modes cause their instantaneous energy exchange
rates to span five orders of magnitude. These findings open new avenues for
reconfigurable optomechanical networks, nonreciprocal energy transport, and
precision sensing based on dynamically tunable mechanical nonlinearities.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Harry A. Atwater”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=3