Femtometer-amplitude imaging of coherent super high frequency vibrations in micromechanical resonators

Published

February 4, 2022

Author(s)

Lei Shao, Vikrant Gokhale, Bo Peng, Peng-Hui Song, Jingjie Cheng, Justin Kuo, Amit Lal, Wen-Ming Zhang, Jason Gorman

Abstract

The ability to measure femtometer scale vibrations at microwave frequencies is important in applications as diverse as ultracoherent resonators for 5G wireless communications, ultrasensitive detectors for mass and force, and acoustic resonators for quantum memory and state transfer. However, the resolution of state-of-the-art optical interferometry has been limited to sub-picometer vibrations at several gigahertz (GHz), which is insufficient since vibration amplitudes typically get smaller as frequency increases. Here we present a stroboscopic optical sampling approach to the transduction of coherent super high frequency vibrations, and demonstrate phase-sensitive absolute displacement detection with a noise floor of 55 fm/√Hz for frequencies up to 12 GHz, achieving a much higher bandwidth and significantly lower noise level simultaneously. This approach allows for the detection of several tens to hundreds of coherent acoustic phonons in a nanoresonator, with the potential for detecting near quantized oscillation. An acoustic resonator with resonances above 10 GHz and with displacements of only several tens of femtometer is imaged to reveal complex mode superposition and dispersion.

Citation

Nature Communications

Volume

13

Issue

1

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28223-w

Local Download

Keywords

Pulsed laser interferometer, stroboscopic, modal imaging, microwave vibrations, bulk acoustic resonator

Citation

Shao, L. , Gokhale, V. , Peng, B. , Song, P. , Cheng, J. , Kuo, J. , Lal, A. , Zhang, W. and Gorman, J. (2022), Femtometer-amplitude imaging of coherent super high frequency vibrations in micromechanical resonators, Nature Communications, [online], https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28223-w , https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=930877 (Accessed October 9, 2025)