Science Alert  August 7, 2020
An international team of researchers (USA – UC Merced, Australia) demonstrates a way to realize a Casimir spring and engineer dilution in macroscopic optomechanics by coupling a metallic SiN membrane to a photonic re-entrant cavity. The attraction of the spatially localized Casimir spring mimics a non-contacting boundary condition giving rise to increased strain and acoustic coherence through dissipation dilution. This provides a way to manipulate phonons via thermal photons leading to ‘in situ’ reconfigurable mechanical states, to reduce loss mechanisms and to create additional types of acoustic nonlinearity—all at room temperature…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Credit: Jake Art