Phonon and photon lasing dynamics in optomechanical cavities

Lasers differ from other light sources in that they are coherent, and their coherence makes them indispensable to both fundamental research and practical application. In optomechanical cavities, photon and phonon lasing is facilitated by the ability of photons and phonons to interact intensively and excite one another coherently. The lasing linewidths of both phonons and photons are critical for practical application. This study investigates the lasing linewidths of photons and phonons from the underlying dynamics in an optomechanical cavity. We find that the linewidths can be accounted for by two distinct physical mechanisms in two regimes, namely the normal regime and the reversed regime, where the intrinsic optical decay rate is either larger or smaller than the intrinsic mechanical decay rate. In the normal regime, an ultra-narrow spectral linewidth of 5.4 kHz for phonon lasing at 6.22 GHz can be achieved regardless of the linewidth of the pump light, while these results are counterintuitively unattainable for photon lasing in the reversed regime. These results pave the way towards harnessing the coherence of both photons and phonons in silicon photonic devices and reshaping their spectra, potentially opening up new technologies in sensing, metrology, spectroscopy, and signal processing, as well as in applications requiring sources that offer an ultra-high degree of coherence.