Nonreciprocal control and cooling of phonon modes in an optomechanical system

Mechanical resonators are important components of devices that range from gravitational wave detectors to cellular telephones. They serve as high-performance transducers, sensors and filters by offering low dissipation, tunable coupling to diverse physical systems, and compatibility with a wide range of frequencies, materials and fabrication processes. Systems of mechanical resonators typically obey reciprocity, which ensures that the phonon transmission coefficient between any two resonators is independent of the direction of transmission(1,2). Reciprocity must be broken to realize devices (such as isolators and circulators) that provide one-way propagation of acoustic energy between resonators. Such devices are crucial for protecting active elements, mitigating noise and operating full-duplex transceivers. Until now, nonreciprocal phononic devices(3-11) have not simultaneously combined the features necessary for robust operation: strong nonreciprocity, in situ tunability, compact integration and continuous operation. Furthermore, they have been applied only to coherent signals (rather than fluctuations or noise), and have been realized exclusively in travelling-wave systems (rather than resonators). Here we describe a scheme that uses the standard cavity-optomechanical interaction to produce robust nonreciprocal coupling between phononic resonators. This scheme provides about 30 decibels of isolation in continuous operation and can be tuned in situ simply via the phases of the drive tones applied to the cavity. In addition, by directly monitoring the dynamics of the resonators we show that this nonreciprocity can control thermal fluctuations, and that this control represents a way to cool phononic resonators.