Permanent Directional Heat Currents in Lattices of Optomechanical Resonators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to induce and control directional heat currents in lattices of optomechanical resonators using coherent optical driving, without thermal gradients or direct mechanical coupling.

Contribution

It introduces a general method to derive effective phonon dynamics in optomechanical lattices and shows how to stabilize stationary states with directional heat flow.

Findings

Directional heat currents can be stabilized over arbitrary distances.

The method applies to arbitrary lattice geometries.

Stationary states exhibit nonequilibrium phonon dynamics without thermal gradients.

Abstract

We study the phonon dynamics in lattices of optomechanical resonators where the mutually coupled photonic modes are coherently driven and the mechanical resonators are uncoupled and connected to independent thermal baths. We present a general procedure to obtain the effective Lindblad dynamics of the phononic modes for an arbitrary lattice geometry, where the light modes play the role of an effective reservoir that mediates the phonon nonequilibrium dynamics. We show how to stabilize stationary states exhibiting directional heat currents over arbitrary distance, despite the absence of thermal gradient and of direct coupling between the mechanical resonators.