Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is traditionally viewed as a process whose strength is dictated by intrinsic material nonlinearities with little dependence on waveguide geometry. We show that this paradigm breaks down at the nanoscale, as tremendous radiation pressures produce new forms of SBS nonlinearities. A coherent combination of radiation pressure and electrostrictive forces is seen to enhance both forward and backward SBS processes by orders of magnitude, creating new geometric degrees of freedom through which photon-phonon coupling becomes highly tailorable. At nanoscales, the backward-SBS gain is seen to be 10 4 times greater than in conventional silica fibers with 100 times greater values than predicted by conventional SBS treatments. Furthermore, radically enhanced forward-SBS processes are 10 5 times larger than any known waveguide system. In addition, when nanoscale silicon waveguides are cooled to low temperatures, a further 10-100 times increase in SBS gain is seen as phonon losses are reduced. As a result, a 100-m segment of the waveguide has equivalent nonlinearity to a kilometer of fiber. Couplings of this magnitude would enable efficient chip-scale stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon waveguides for the first time. More generally, we develop a new full-vectorial theoretical formulation of stimulated Brillouin scattering that accurately incorporates the effects of boundary-induced nonlinearities and radiation pressure, both of which are seen to have tremendous impact on photonphonon coupling at subwavelength scales. This formalism, which treats both intermode and intramode coupling within periodic and translationally invariant waveguide systems, reveals a rich landscape of new stimulated Brillouin processes when applied to nanoscale systems.

Nanoscale modal confinement is known to radically enhance the effect of intrinsic Kerr and Raman nonlinearities within nanophotonic silicon waveguides. By contrast, stimulated Brillouin-scattering nonlinearities, which involve coherent coupling between guided photon and phonon modes, are stifled in conventional nanophotonics, preventing the realization of a host of Brillouin-based signal-processing technologies in silicon. Here we demonstrate stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon waveguides, for the first time, through a new class of hybrid photonic–phononic waveguides. Tailorable travelling-wave forward-stimulated Brillouin scattering is realized—with over 1,000 times larger nonlinearity than reported in previous systems—yielding strong Brillouin coupling to phonons from 1 to 18 GHz. Experiments show that radiation pressures, produced by subwavelength modal confinement, yield enhancement of Brillouin nonlinearity beyond those of material nonlinearity alone. In addition, such enhanced and wideband coherent phonon emission paves the way towards the hybridization of silicon photonics, microelectromechanical systems and CMOS signal-processing technologies on chip.

The ability to engineer and manipulate different varieties of quantum mechanical objects allows us to take advantage of their unique properties and create useful hybrid technologies 1 .Thus far, complex quantum states and exquisite quantum control have been demonstrated in systems ranging from trapped ions 2, 3 and solid state qubits 4,5 to superconducting microwave resonators 6,7 . Recently, there have been many efforts 8,9 to extend these demonstrations to the motion of complex, macroscopic objects. These mechanical objects have important practical applications in the fields of quantum information and metrology as quantum memories or transducers for measuring and connecting different types of quantum systems. In pursuit of such macroscopic quantum phenomena, mechanical oscillators have been interfaced with quantum devices such as optical cavities and superconducting circuits [10][11][12] . In particular, there have been a few experiments that couple motion to nonlinear quantum objects [13][14][15] such as superconducting qubits. Importantly, this opens up the possibility of creating, storing, and manipulating non-Gaussian quantum states in mechanical degrees of freedom. However, before sophisticated quantum control of mechanical motion can be achieved, we must overcome the challenge of realizing systems with long coherence times while maintaining a 1 arXiv:1703.00342v1 [quant-ph] 1 Mar 2017 sufficient interaction strength. These systems should be implemented in a simple and robust manner that allows for increasing complexity and scalability in the future. Here we experimentally demonstrate a high frequency bulk acoustic wave resonator that is strongly coupled to a superconducting qubit using piezoelectric transduction. In contrast to previous experiments with qubit-mechanical systems [13][14][15] , our device requires only simple fabrication methods, extends coherence times to many microseconds, and provides controllable access to a multitude of phonon modes. We use this system to demonstrate basic quantum operations on the coupled qubit-phonon system. Straightforward improvements to the current device will allow for advanced protocols analogous to what has been shown in optical and microwave resonators, resulting in a novel resource for implementing hybrid quantum technologies.Measuring and controlling the motion of massive objects in the quantum regime is of great interest for both technological applications and for furthering our understanding of quantum mechanics in complex systems. In some respects, the physics of phonons inside a crystal is similar to that of photons inside an electromagnetic resonator, which are routinely treated as quantum mechanical objects. However, such mechanical excitations involve the collective motion of a large number of atoms in the complex environment of a macroscopic object. Nevertheless, there has only been one demonstration of a nonlinear electromechanical system in the strong coupling limit 13 . The outstanding question is how to simultaneously achieve coherences 3 and c...

Photonic crystals offer unprecedented opportunities for miniaturization and integration of optical devices. They also exhibit a variety of new physical phenomena, including suppression or enhancement of spontaneous emission, low-threshold lasing, and quantum information processing. Various techniques for the fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) photonic crystals--such as silicon micromachining, wafer fusion bonding, holographic lithography, self-assembly, angled-etching, micromanipulation, glancing-angle deposition and auto-cloning--have been proposed and demonstrated with different levels of success. However, a critical step towards the fabrication of functional 3D devices, that is, the incorporation of microcavities or waveguides in a controllable way, has not been achieved at optical wavelengths. Here we present the fabrication of 3D photonic crystals that are particularly suited for optical device integration using a lithographic layer-by-layer approach. Point-defect microcavities are introduced during the fabrication process and optical measurements show they have resonant signatures around telecommunications wavelengths (1.3-1.5 microm). Measurements of reflectance and transmittance at near-infrared are in good agreement with numerical simulations.