Quantum Optics Colloquium by Florian Marquardt

Tayloring the Flow of Sound and Light

The interaction between light and mechanical motion in engineered nanostructures can be exploited to taylor the flow of both sound and light. In this presentation, I will first give a brief introduction to the field of cavity optomechanics. Afterwards, I will describe how we envisage future platforms of optomechanical arrays, consisting of many interacting optical and vibrational modes. I will then show how such an array could give rise to topologically protected transport of sound and light, and I will discuss how this could be implemented in a photonic crystal platform.

[1] "Cavity optomechanics”, Markus Aspelmeyer, Tobias Kippenberg, and
Florian Marquardt, Reviews of Modern Physics 86, 1391 (2014)

[2] "Topological Phases of Sound and Light”, Vittorio Peano, Christian
Brendel, Michael Schmidt, and Florian Marquardt,Phys. Rev. X 5, 031011 (2015)

[3] "Optomechanical creation of magnetic fields for photons on a lattice”,
M. Schmidt, S. Keßler, V. Peano, O. Painter, F. Marquardt, Optica 2, 635 (2015)