Nano-optomechanical fiber-tip sensing

Abstract

Nano-optomechanical sensors exploit light confinement at the nanoscale to enable very precise measurements of displacement, force, acceleration, and mass. Their application is hampered by the complex optical set-ups or packaging schemes required to couple light to and from the nano-optomechanical resonator. In this work, we present a fiber-coupled nano-optomechanical sensor that requires no coupling optics. This is achieved by directly placing a nano-optomechanical structure, a double membrane photonic crystal (DM-PhC), on the facet of a fiber, using a simple and scalable wafer-to-fiber transfer method. The device is probed in reflection and has a resonance at telecom wavelengths with a relatively broad spectral width of 3–10 nm, which is advantageous for a simple read-out and achieves a displacement imprecision of $$10\,{{\rm{fm}}}/{\sqrt{{\rm{Hz}}}}$$ 10 fm / Hz . Using resonant driving and a ringdown measurement, we can induce and monitor mechanical oscillations with an nm-scale amplitude via the fiber, which allows for tracking the mechanical resonant frequency and the mechanical linewidth with imprecisions of 79 and 12 Hz, respectively, at integration times of 4.5 s. We further demonstrate the application of this fiber-tip sensor to the measurement of pressure, using the effect of collisional damping on the mechanical linewidth, leading to the imprecision of $$9\times {10}^{-4}\,{\rm{mbar}}$$ 9 × 10 − 4 mbar with an integration time of 290 s. This combination of optomechanics and fiber-tip sensing may open the way to a new generation of fiber sensors with unprecedented functionality, ultrasmall footprint, and low-cost readout.