Injection-locked phonon lasing driven by an individual plasmonic metamolecule

Abstract: Nanophotonic devices take advantage of geometry-dependent optical properties to confine and enhance the interaction of light with matter on small scales. By carefully patterning nanoscale geometries, coupling of responses across distinct physical domains can be achieved, such as photon and phonon modes in optomechanical crystals. Extreme optical confinement of plasmonics can localize strong cross-domain interactions into nanometer-scale volumes, smaller than many nanosystem's thermal and mechanical eigenmodes, opening new regimes for engineering reconfigurable, dynamic nanosystems. Here, we present a nanosystem based on an electrically actuated, mechanically coupled gap-plasmon metamolecule resonator. Integrated electrical actuation reveals distinct dispersive and reactive optomechanical coupling regimes of the metamolecules, and enables both broad spectral tuning of individual plasmonic resonances and selective optical transduction of nanomechanical modes. Strong thermomechanical backaction from a single point-like metamolecule yields optically driven self-oscillation, and we show that this metamolecule phonon laser can be injection-locked to enhance weak mechanical stimulii. This multi-domain nanosystem advances nanomechanical sensing and optical modulation, opens new avenues for studying nanoscale nonlinear optomechanics, and may serve as a building block for future reconfigurable "smart" metamaterials.