Abstract:

Nanophotonic optomechanical devices allow highly sensitive optical coupling to nanomechanical resonances, providing opportunities for probing their quantum properties, and for creating sensing and information processing technologies. Owing its desirable optical and mechanical properties, single crystal diamond is an attractive material for implementing optomechanical devices. In addition, diamond hosts color centers whose highly coherent electronic and nuclear spins are promising for quantum information science.

We have recently demonstrated a diamond chip-based optomechanical system which allows sensitive readout of mechanical resonances with ultrahigh mechanical quality factor. This waveguide optomechanical device exhibits striking nonlinear nanomechanical behaviour, can be optically cooled to mK temperatures, and may allow coupling between nanomechanical resonances and single diamond spins.  We have also created high quality factor diamond optical microcavities, which are promising devices for high-frequency optomechanics.  This talk will review this work, together with related optomechanics results obtained in more conventional semiconductor materials such as silicon and GaP.