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Nanomechanical structures can be coupled to light in order to control their mechanical vibrations. Recent experimental developments in this field of "cavity optomechanics" have led to laser-cooling of such vibrations to their quantum ground state and entanglement between mechanics and the radiation field. A particularly promising platform consists in photonic crystal structures with optical and vibrational modes localized at defect sites. If these sites were to be arranged periodically, they would form an "optomechanical array" that can be described via a tight-binding model of interacting photons and phonons. I will describe our theoretical predictions, including light-induced synchronization of mechanical oscillators, quantum many-body dynamics of photons and phonons, Dirac physics on an optomechanical honeycomb lattice, and the possibility of generating artificial photonic gauge fields.

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Prof. Dr. Florian Marquardt, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Seminarraum Theoretische Physik
Contact: not specified