Quantum Physics
Celebrated Optical Frequency Comb Goes Vibrational
18 January 2017
For electromagnetic radiation the celebrated frequency comb has brought the precision of atomic clocks that operate in the microwave region to the optical part of the spectrum.
Very recently a work published in Phys.Rev.Lett. 118, 033903 (2017) has demonstrated that phononic frequency combs can be generated via intrinsic three-wave mixing.
A micromechanical device generates a series of precise, equally spaced vibration frequencies, analogous to the light of the optical frequency comb.
This work is an experimental realization and implementation of our theoretical work on phononic frequency combs through nonlinear resonances in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 075505 (2014).
In the underlying process, a set of phonon modes is simultaneously excited by the external driving which yields frequency combs with an array of discrete and equidistant spectral lines of each nonlinearly excited phonon mode. Frequency combs through nonlinear resonance of different orders have been investigated, and in particular the possibility of correlation tailoring in higher-order cases is revealed. These results can be applied in various nonlinear acoustic processes, such as phonon harvesting, and can also be generalized to other nonlinear systems.
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