Confocal Scanner for Highly Sensitive Photonic Transduction of Nanomechanical Resonators

We show that a simple confocal laser scanning system can be used to couple light through grating couplers into nanophotonic circuits. The coupling efficiency is better than 15% per coupler. Our technique avoids using multi-axis fibre stages and is especially advantageous when the nanophotonic circui...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied physics express 2013-06, Vol.6 (6), p.065202-065202-4
Main Authors: Diao, Zhu, Losby, Joseph E, Sauer, Vincent T. K, Westwood, Jocelyn N, Freeman, Mark R, Hiebert, Wayne K
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We show that a simple confocal laser scanning system can be used to couple light through grating couplers into nanophotonic circuits. The coupling efficiency is better than 15% per coupler. Our technique avoids using multi-axis fibre stages and is especially advantageous when the nanophotonic circuit is kept in vacuum, e.g., for nanomechanical resonator displacement transduction. This was demonstrated by recording the resonant response of a nanomechanical doubly clamped beam embedded in a race-track optical cavity. The nanophotonic transduction offers an increase of two orders of magnitude in transduction responsivity compared with conventional free-space optical interferometry.
ISSN:1882-0778
1882-0786
DOI:10.7567/APEX.6.065202