Slot-mode optomechanical crystals: a versatile platform for multimode optomechanics

Cavity optomechanical systems are being studied for their potential in areas such as metrology, communications, and quantum information science. For a number of recently proposed applications in which multiple optical and mechanical modes interact, an outstanding challenge is to develop multimode architectures that allow flexibility in optical and mechanical subsystem designs while maintaining the strong interactions that have been demonstrated in single-mode systems. To that end, we demonstrate slot-mode optomechanical crystals, devices in which photonic and phononic crystal nanobeams separated by a narrow slot are coupled via optomechanical interactions. These nanobeam pairs are patterned to confine a mechanical breathing mode at the center of one beam and a low-loss optical mode in the slot between the beams. This architecture affords great design flexibility toward multimode optomechanics, as well as substantial optomechanical coupling rates. We show this by producing slot-mode devices in stoichiometric Si3N4, with optical modes in the 980 nm band coupled to mechanical modes at 3.4 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 400 MHz. We exploit the Si3N4 tensile stress to achieve slot widths down to 24 nm, which leads to enhanced optomechanical coupling, sufficient for the observation of optomechanical self-oscillations at all studied frequencies. We then develop multimode optomechanical systems with triple-beam geometries, in which two optical modes couple to a single mechanical mode, and two mechanical modes couple to a single optical mode. Taken together, these results demonstrate great flexibility in the design of multimode chip-scale optomechanical systems with large optomechanical coupling.