Design of dispersive optomechanical coupling and cooling in ultrahigh-Q/V slot-type photonic crystal cavities

Abstract

We describe the strong optomechanical dynamical interactions in ultrahigh-Q/V slot-type photonic crystal cavities. The dispersive coupling is based on mode-gap photonic crystal cavities with light localization in an air mode with 0.02(λ/n)3 modal volumes while preserving optical cavity Q up to 5×10(6). The mechanical mode is modeled to have fundamental resonance Ωm/2π of 460 MHz and a quality factor Qm estimated at 12,000. For this slot-type optomechanical cavity, the dispersive coupling gom is numerically computed at up to 940 GHz/nm (Lom of 202 nm) for the fundamental optomechanical mode. Dynamical parametric oscillations for both cooling and amplification, in the resolved and unresolved sideband limit, are examined numerically, along with the displacement spectral density and cooling rates for various operating parameters.