Nonreciprocity and magnetic-free isolation based on optomechanical interactions

Understand

Photonic nonreciprocal components, such as isolators and circulators, provide highly desirable functionalities for optical circuitry.

• This motivates the active investigation of mechanisms that break reciprocity, and pose alternatives to magneto-optic effects in on-chip systems.
• In this work, we use optomechanical interactions to strongly break reciprocity in a compact system.
• We derive minimal requirements to create nonreciprocity in a wide class of systems that couple two optical modes to a mechanical mode, highlighting the importance of optically biasing the modes at a controlled phase difference.