Nanowerk  June 19, 2023 An international team of researchers (Argentina, Germany) demonstrated that light emitters with different resonance frequencies can asynchronously self-lock their relative energies by exchanging mechanical energy. They introduced polaromechanical metamaterials, two-dimensional arrays of μm-sized traps confining zero-dimensional light-matter polariton fluids and GHz phonons. A strong exciton-mediated polariton-phonon interaction induced a time-dependent inter-site polariton coupling J(t) with remarkable consequences for the dynamics. When locally perturbed by continuous wave optical excitation, a mechanical self-oscillation started and polaritons responded by locking the energy detuning between neighbor sites at integer multiples of the phonon energy showing asynchronous locking involving the polariton […]