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Controlling and modulating the flow of light is essential in today's telecommunications-based society. Professor Tobias Kippenberg and his team in EPFL's Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements have discovered a novel way to couple light and vibrations. Using this discovery, they built a device in which a beam of light traveling through an optical microresonator could be controlled by a second, stronger light beam. The device thus acts like an optical transistor, in which one light beam influences the intensity of another.
Their optical microresonator has two characteristics: first, it traps light in a tiny glass structure, guiding the beam into a circular pattern. Second, the structure vibrates, like a wine glass, at well-defined frequencies. Because the structure is so tiny (a fraction of the diameter of a human hair), these frequencies are 10,000 times higher than a wineglass vibration. When light is injected into the device, the photons exert a force called radiation pressure, which is greatly enhanced by the resonator. The increasing pressure deforms the cavity, coupling the light to the mechanical vibrations. If two light beams are used, the interaction of the two lasers with the mechanical vibrations results in a kind of optical "switch": the strong "control" laser can turn on or off a weaker "probe" laser just as in a electronic transistor.
"We have known for more than two years that this effect was theoretically possible," explains Max-Planck Institute scientist Albert Schliesser, but pinning it down proved difficult. "Once we knew where to look, it was right there," recalls EPFL PhD student Stefan Weis, one of the lead authors of the paper. Senior EPFL scientist Samuel Delglise notes that "the agreement between theory and experiment is really striking."
Applications of this novel effect, baptised "OMIT" (optomechanically-induced transparency), could provide entirely new functionality to photonics. Radiation-t
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| Contact: Tobias Kippenberg tobias.kippenberg@epfl.ch 41-216-934-428 Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne Source:Eurekalert |