Brillouin cooling in a linear waveguide

Abstract

Brillouin scattering is not usually considered as a mechanism that can cause cooling of a material due to the thermodynamic dominance of Stokes scattering in most practical systems. However, it has been shown in experiments on resonators that net phonon annihilation through anti-Stokes Brillouin scattering can be enabled by means of a suitable set of optical and acoustic states. The cooling of traveling phonons in a linear waveguide, on the other hand, could lead to the exciting future prospect of manipulating unidirectional phonon fluxes and even the nonreciprocal transport of quantum information via phonons. In this work, we present an analysis of the conditions under which Brillouin cooling of phonons of both low and high group velocities may be achieved in a linear waveguide. We analyze the three-wave mixing interaction between the optical and traveling acoustic modes that participate in forward Brillouin scattering, and reveal the key regimes of operation for the process. Our calculations indicate that measurable cooling may occur in a system having phonons with spatial loss rate that is of the same order as the spatial optical loss rate. If the Brillouin gain in such a waveguide reaches the order of 10 ^5 m ^−1 W ^−1 , appreciable cooling of phonon modes may be observed with modest pump power of a few mW.

Keywords

• Brillouin scattering
• laser cooling
• optomechanics