Abstract
Optical gradient fields have been successfully used in various areas, e. g. as optical tweezers. Recently, evanescent fields were employed to sense nanomechanical motion[l]. Enhancing the optomechanical coupling via a cavity offers significantly higher sensitivities. More importantly, cavity retardation effects [2] can render the back-action which any linear position measurement must entail dynamical. We show that the evanescent field of ultra-high finesse whispering gallery mode (WGM) microcavities can be efficiently used to sense the motion of nanomechanical objects and report the first observation of dynamical back-action using optical gradient fields.
© 2009 IEEE
PDF Article