Collectively-enhanced optomechanical coupling in periodic arrays of scatterers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a periodic array of scatterers inside an optical cavity can achieve significantly enhanced collective optomechanical coupling at transmissive points, surpassing traditional reflective ensembles.

Contribution

It extends previous work by showing how transmissive points in a scatterer array lead to much stronger optomechanical coupling, with detailed analysis of the scaling laws involved.

Findings

Transmissive points enable linear optomechanical coupling much stronger than reflective ensembles.

Coupling strengths can be several orders of magnitude larger at transmissive points.

The paper details the scaling laws of coupling in various regimes.

Abstract

We investigate the optomechanical properties of a periodic array of identical scatterers placed inside an optical cavity and extend the results of [A. Xuereb, C. Genes, and A. Dantan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 223601 (2012)]. We show that operating at the points where the array is transmissive results in linear optomechanical coupling strengths between the cavity field and collective motional modes of the array that may be several orders of magnitude larger than is possible with an equivalent reflective ensemble. We describe and interpret these effects in detail and investigate the nature of the scaling laws of the coupling strengths for the different transmissive points in various regimes.