Thermodynamic optical pressures in tight-binding nonlinear multimode photonic systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a thermodynamic framework to analytically describe optical pressures in highly multimode nonlinear photonic systems, providing simple formulas that match numerical results and advancing understanding of optomechanical forces in complex environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel thermodynamic approach to analyze optical pressures in heavily multimode, nonlinear photonic networks, yielding analytical expressions for forces in complex arrangements.

Findings

Derived closed-form expressions for thermodynamic optical pressures.

Excellent agreement between theoretical predictions and numerical simulations.

Potential applications in controlling radiation forces in multimode optomechanical systems.

Abstract

Optical forces are known to arise in a universal fashion in many and diverse physical settings. As such, they are successfully employed over a wide range of applications in areas like biophotonics, optomechanics and integrated optics. While inter-elemental optical forces in few-mode photonic networks have been so far systematically analyzed, little is known, if any, as to how they manifest themselves in highly multimoded optical environments. In this work, by means of statistical mechanics, we formally address this open problem in optically thermalized weakly nonlinear heavily multimode tight-binding networks. The outlined thermodynamic formulation allows one to obtain in an elegant manner analytical results for the exerted thermodynamic pressures in utterly complex arrangements-results that are either computationally intensive or impossible to obtain otherwise. Thus, we derive simple closed-form expressions for the thermodynamic optical pressures displayed among elements, which depend only on the internal energy as well as the coupling coefficients involved. In all cases, our theoretical results are in excellent agreement with numerical computations. Our study may pave the way towards a deeper understanding of these complex processes and could open up avenues in harnessing radiation forces in multimode optomechanical systems.