Self-Sustained Oscillation and Dynamical Multistability of Optomechanical Systems in the Extremely-Large-Amplitude Regime

Optomechanics concerns with the coupling between optical cavities and mechanical resonators. Most early works are concentrated in the physics of optomechanics in the small-displacement regime and consider one single optical cavity mode participating in the optomechanical coupling. In this paper, we focus on optomechanics in the extremely-large-amplitude regime in which a mechanical resonator is coupled with multiple optical cavity modes during the oscillation. We explicitly show that the mechanical resonator can present self-sustained oscillations in a novel way with limit cycles in the shape of sawtooth-edged ellipses and exhibit dynamical multistability. By analyzing the mechanical oscillation process and the accompanied variation of the optical cavity occupation, we develop an energy-balanced condition to ensure the stability of self-sustained oscillation. The effect of the mechanical nonlinearities on the dynamics of the mechanical resonator is also investigated.