Brillouin Scattering Self-Cancellation
Abstract
The interaction between light and acoustic phonons is strongly modified in sub-wavelength confinement, and has led to the demonstration and control of Brillouin scattering in photonic structures such as nano-scale optical waveguides and cavities. Besides the small optical mode volume, two physical mechanisms come into play simultaneously: a volume effect caused by the strain induced refractive index perturbation (known as photo-elasticity), and a surface effect caused by the shift of the optical boundaries due to mechanical vibrations. As a result proper material and structure engineering allows one to control each contribution individually. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the perfect cancellation of Brillouin scattering by engineering a silica nanowire with exactly opposing photo-elastic and moving-boundary effects. This demonstration provides clear experimental evidence that the interplay between the two mechanisms is a promising tool to precisely control the photon-phonon interaction, enhancing or suppressing it.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1601.05248,
title = {Brillouin Scattering Self-Cancellation},
author = {Omar Florez and Paulo F. Jarschel and Yovanny A. V. Espinel and Cristiano M. B. Cordeiro and Thiago P. Mayer Alegre and Gustavo S. Wiederhecker and Paulo Dainese},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.05248},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
8 pages, 5 figures, supplementary material