Stimulated optomechanical excitation of surface acoustic waves in a microdevice

Stimulated Brillouin interaction between sound and light, known to be the strongest optical nonlinearity common to all amorphous and crystalline dielectrics, has been widely studied in fibres and bulk materials but rarely in optical microresonators. The possibility of experimentally extending this principle to excite mechanical resonances in photonic microsystems, for sensing and frequency reference applications, has remained largely unexplored. The challenge lies in the fact that microresonators inherently have large free spectral range, whereas the phase-matching considerations for the Brillouin process require optical modes of nearby frequencies but with different wave vectors. Here we rely on high-order transverse optical modes to relax this limitation and report the experimental excitation of mechanical resonances ranging from 49 to 1,400 MHz by using forward Brillouin scattering. These natural mechanical resonances are excited in ∼100 μm silica microspheres, and are of a surface-acoustic whispering-gallery type.