Optomechanical Metamaterials: Dirac polaritons, Gauge fields, and Instabilities

Understand

Freestanding photonic crystals can be used to trap both light and mechanical vibrations.

• These "optomechanical crystal" structures have already been experimentally demonstrated to yield strong coupling between a photon mode and a phonon mode, co-localized at a single defect site.
• Future devices may feature a regular superlattice of such defects, turning them into "optomechanical arrays".
• In this letter we predict that tailoring the optomechanical band structure of such arrays can be used to implement Dirac physics of photons and phonons, to create a photonic gauge field via mechanical vibrations, and to observe a novel optomechanical instability.