Abstract
We design a silica zipper cavity that has high optical and mechanical Q (quality factor) values and demonstrate numerically the feasibility of a radiation pressure driven micro opto-mechanical system (MOMS) directional switch. The silica zipper cavity has an optical Q of 4.0 × 104 and an effective mode volume Vmode of 0.67λ3 when the gap between two cavities is 34 nm. The mechanical Q (Qm) is determined by thermo-elastic damping and is 2.0 × 106 in a vacuum at room temperature. The opto-mechanical coupling rate gOM is as high as 100 GHz/nm, which allows us to move the directional cavity-waveguide system and switch 1550-nm light with 770-nm light by controlling the radiation pressure.
Highlights
Cavity opto-mechanics enables the dynamic manipulation of the oscillation of cavity structures[1].research[14, 15], are attractive candidates as platforms for cavity opto-mechanics applications owing to their strong light confinement and extremely small mode volume
It is known that thermo-elastic loss is usually the dominant mechanical loss in a vacuum and at room temperature[21, 33, 34].The loss is expressed by the following equation
Our idea is to use a silica zipper cavity to change the gap dynamically between the two nanowires that allow us to obtain different coupling strengths and switch the light direction. The operation of this micro sized mechanical system is driven by optical radiation force; we named it as a micro opto-mechanical system (MOMS)
Summary
Cavity opto-mechanics enables the dynamic manipulation of the oscillation of cavity structures[1]. The mechanical Q is limited by, for example, viscous or fluidic damping, thermo-elastic damping, and support-induced damping[20]. Viscous damping is so high that most experiments are usually carried out in a vacuum where thermo-elastic loss is usually the dominating factor[21]. We design a silica zipper cavity with high optical and mechanical Q values even at room temperature and analyze its optical and mechanical properties in detail. This paper is organized as follows; first in Sec. II we describe the design and the optical properties of our silica zipper cavity. A high Q is difficult to achieve with a low-index material, but we show that our zipper cavity even exhibits a high Q/V.
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