Tunnelling of transverse acoustic waves on a silicon chip

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a scalable method for controlling transverse acoustic waves on a silicon chip using virtual-phonon coupling, enabling advanced nanomechanical circuits for computing and sensing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel virtual-phonon coupling technique via tunnelling through a zero-mode acoustic barrier, facilitating large-scale nanomechanical circuit construction.

Findings

Successful demonstration of virtual-phonon coupling between mechanical elements

Development of a scalable fabrication technique for nanomechanical circuits

Implementation of mode-selective acoustic mirrors and spatial mode filtering

Abstract

Nanomechanical circuits for transverse acoustic waves promise to enable new approaches to computing, precision biochemical sensing and many other applications. However, progress is hampered by the lack of precise control of the coupling between nanomechanical elements. Here, we demonstrate virtual-phonon coupling between transverse mechanical elements, exploiting tunnelling through a zero-mode acoustic barrier. This allows the construction of large-scale nanomechanical circuits on a silicon chip, for which we develop a new scalable fabrication technique. As example applications, we build mode-selective acoustic mirrors with controllable reflectivity and demonstrate acoustic spatial mode filtering. Our work paves the way towards applications such as fully nanomechanical computer processors and distributed nanomechanical sensors, and to explore the rich landscape of nonlinear nanomechanical dynamics.