Recent progress in photonics has highlighted the importance of miniaturization, particularly in achieving dielectric bowtie cavities with small mode volumes, which were previously limited to plasmonics. This study presents a novel method that combines top-down nanopatterning and bottom-up self-assembly to fabricate photonic cavities with atomic-scale dimensions. By utilizing surface forces, we demonstrate waveguide-coupled silicon photonic cavities with high quality factors, confining light to atomic-scale air gaps with an aspect ratio above 100, corresponding to mode volumes more than 100 times below the diffraction limit. These cavities exhibit unprecedented figures of merit for enhancing light-matter interaction and enable charting hitherto inaccessible regimes of solid-state quantum electrodynamics.
We explore Anderson-localized cavity optomechanics in a two-dimensional optomechanical platform: a waveguide etched in a suspended silicon membrane with an air slot. Inherent, unavoidable fabrication imperfections induce sufficient backscattering to realize Anderson-localized optical modes which can be driven to enable phonon lasing via optomechanical back-action. We observe mechanical lasing up to 6.8 GHz that results from confinement of the mechanical mode. The role of disorder in cavity optomechanics has thus far been largely overlooked, though our results indicate that it can have a decisive impact on device functionality and opens perspectives for studies of multiple scattering and Anderson localization of bosonic excitations with parametric coupling to mechanical degrees of freedom.
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