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arXiv · 1012.1009

Bonding, antibonding and tunable optical forces in asymmetric membranes

Alejandro W. Rodriguez·Alexander P. McCauley·Pui-Chuen Hui·David Woolf·Eiji Iwase·Federico Capasso·Marko Loncar·Steven G. Johnson
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Abstract

We demonstrate that tunable attractive (bonding) and repulsive (anti-bonding) forces can arise in highly asymmetric structures coupled to external radiation, a consequence of the bonding/anti-bonding level repulsion of guided-wave resonances that was first predicted in symmetric systems. Our focus is a geometry consisting of a photonic-crystal (holey) membrane suspended above an unpatterned layered substrate, supporting planar waveguide modes that can couple via the periodic modulation of the holey membrane. Asymmetric geometries have a clear advantage in ease of fabrication and experimental characterization compared to symmetric double-membrane structures. We show that the asymmetry can also lead to unusual behavior in the force magnitudes of a bonding/antibonding pair as the membrane separation changes, including nonmonotonic dependences on the separation. We propose a computational method that obtains the entire force spectrum via a single time-domain simulation, by Fourier-transforming the response to a short pulse and thereby obtaining the frequency-dependent stress tensor. We point out that by operating with two, instead of a single frequency, these evanescent forces can be exploited to tune the spring constant of the membrane without changing its equilibrium separation.

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Alejandro W. Rodriguez, Alexander P. McCauley, Pui-Chuen Hui, David Woolf, Eiji Iwase, Federico Capasso, Marko Loncar, Steven G. Johnson. 2011-01-16. Bonding, antibonding and tunable optical forces in asymmetric membranes. https://doi.org/10.1364/oe.19.002225

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