Event
NG Microsystems Seminar: Vladimir Aksyuk, "Cavity optomechanical coupling"
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
4:00 p.m.
1146 A.V. Williams Building
Ian White
ianwhite@umd.edu
Northrop Grumman Microsystems Seminar
Cavity optomechanical coupling in chip-scale plasmonic and photonic transducers for nanoscale measurements and optical signal control
Vladimir Aksyuk
Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology
National Institute for Standards and Technologies
Abstract
Devices controlling light via mechanical motion are ubiquitous, from a simple camera’s zoom lens to the arrays of moving mirrors correcting for atmospheric distortions in telescopes and digitally projecting movies on the cinema screens. The same optomechanical coupling provides one of the best known techniques for measuring mechanical motion, covering length scales form atomic force microscopy to kilometer scale LIGO interferometers to the red shift measurements over billions of light years. We study optomechanical coupling in micro and nanoscale systems that combine electromechanics with photonics and plasmonics, and apply such chip based optomechanical transducers to solve nanoscale measurement problems. As one example, I will present a fast and sensitive probe for atomic force microscopy, combining a nanoscale, picogram mechanical cantilever with an integrated optomechanical readout. Reducing the cantilever size not only increases the transduction bandwidth, but also reduces drag and therefore the thermodynamic force noise when operating in air. Even though the cantilever crossection is much smaller than the optical wavelength, the near-filed coupled high quality factor photonic cavity makes our motion readout exquisitely sensitive. As a second example, I will discuss nanomechanical plasmonic systems, where extreme confinement of the gap plasmon optical modes leads to some of the largest optomechanical coupling coefficients ever observed. I will present electro-mechanical gap plasmon phase modulators and our recent results on nanomechanically tunable deep subwavelength gap plasmon resonators with potential applications for both motion metrology and arbitrary wavefront control via nanoelectromechanically tunable optical metasurfaces.
Biography
Vladimir Aksyuk is a Project Leader in the Nanofabrication Research Group. He received a B.S. in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a Ph.D. in Physics from Rutgers University. Following research as a Member of Technical Staff and then Technical Manager at Bell Labs, he joined the research staff at NIST. Vladimir's research focuses on the design and fabrication of novel optical MEMS and NEMS systems. He holds more than 50 patents, and has published over 60 papers. In 2000 he received the Bell Labs President's Gold Award, in 2005 was named among MIT Technology Review magazine's TR35, and in 2008 received a Distinguished Alumni award for Early Career Accomplishments from Rutgers Graduate School. In 2014 he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for contributions to the development of integrated photonic and mechanical microsystems, for pioneering work in using such systems to enable both telecommunications and novel nanoscale, high-throughput, measurement methods, and for contributions to the understanding of the Casimir force. He is interested in microfabricated systems tightly integrating optical and mechanical degrees of freedom at the nanoscale and is currently developing multiple projects in the use of photonic MEMS and NEMS to address fundamental problems in nanomanufacturing.
