This Friday we have an AWESOME talk - please see below. Hope to see many of you there.
Marko
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Masse, Kathleen"
<kath@seas.harvard.edu<mailto:kath@seas.harvard.edu>>
Subject: [Seas-faculty] [Ee-seminars] Electrical Engineering Seminar Friday, March 15,
2013
Date: March 11, 2013 9:51:12 AM EDT
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"'ee-seminars@eecs.harvard.edu<mailto:ee-seminars@eecs.harvard.edu>'
(ee-seminars@eecs.harvard.edu<mailto:ee-seminars@eecs.harvard.edu>)"
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[hseas-logo]
Harvard EE Seminar Series
3-4PM Friday, March 15, 2013
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Refreshments at 2:45
Nanofabricated optomechanical resonators in the quantum regime
Amir Safavi-Naeini
California Institute of Technology
Mechanical resonators are the most basic and ubiquitous physical systems known. In on-chip
form, they are used to process high frequency signals in every cell phone, television, and
laptop. They have also been a critical part of progress in quantum information sciences in
the last few decades in different shapes and forms: From kilogram-scale mirrors for
gravitational wave detection measuring motion at its quantum limits, to the motion of
single ions being used to link qubits for quantum computation.
In this talk, I will present our recent work with mechanical systems in the megahertz to
gigahertz frequency range, formed by nanofabricating novel photonic/phononic structures on
a silicon chip.
These structures are designed to have both optical and mechanical resonances, and laser
light is used to address and manipulate their motional degrees of freedom through
radiation pressure forces. We laser cool these mechanical resonators to their ground
states [1], and observe for the first time the quantum zero-point motion of a
nanomechanical resonator [2]. Conversely, we show that engineered mechanical resonances
drastically modify the optical response of our structures, creating large effective
optical nonlinearities not present in bulk silicon. We experimentally demonstrate aspects
of these nonlinearities by observing 'electromagnetically induced transparency'
and light slowed down to 6 m/s [3-4], as well as wavelength conversion [5-6], and
generation of nonclassical optical radiation [7].
[1] J. Chan et al. "Laser cooling of a nanomechanical oscillator into its quantum
ground state." Nature 478.7367 (2011): 89-92.
[2] ASN et al. "Observation of quantum motion of a nanomechanical resonator."
Physical Review Letters 108.3 (2012): 33602.
[3] ASN, et al. "Electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light with
optomechanics." Nature 472.7341 (2011): 69-73.
[4] ASN et al., in preparation.
[5] ASN, and O Painter. "Proposal for an optomechanical traveling wave phonon–photon
translator." New Journal of Physics 13.1 (2011): 013017.
[6] J.T. Hill, ASN, et al, Nature Communications 3 (2012), 1196.
[7] ASN, et al., "Squeezed light from an optomechanical resonator", in
preparation.
Speaker: Amir is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Physics at the California Institute of
Technology working in the group of Prof. Oskar Painter. He received his B.A.Sc. in
Electrical Engineering (1st rank) from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada,
where he worked briefly as a DSP engineer at RIM (now Blackberry), and Altera. He also
worked as a summer research assistant at the Institute of Quantum Computing. Before
starting at Caltech in 2008 as an NSERC graduate fellow, Amir spent one year at École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), studying engineering and physics and designing
photonics crystal cavities in the group of Prof. Kapon. Amir's recent research has
centered around design, fabrication, and measurement of optomechanical resonators. His
contributions have been featured in numerous magazines, including the New Scientist,
Physics Today, APS Physics, Science Magazine, Science Daily, Nature, and Nature
Photonics.
Host: Donhee Ham and Marko Loncar
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