Spontaneous parametric down-conversion induced by optomechanical gradient forces in nanophotonic waveguides

Abstract: Optomechanical gradient forces arise from evanescent fields of guided waves in parallel photonic waveguides. When designed to be of attractive nature, they increase exponentially as the gap between the waveguides decreases. Moreover, the amplitude of the gradient force can be well controlled due to its linear dependence on the input laser power. Here, we propose to exploit the intrinsic nonlinear nature of the optomechanical gradient force to induce a tunable 3-wave coupling between the fundamental modes of two doubly clamped nanophotonic beams. For one of the beams having half the width of the other beam, the 1:2 internal resonance between the fundamental modes supports degenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). We theoretically explore the main feature of the dissipative phase diagram of the underlying degenerate parametric oscillator model to show that the critical point of the SPDC occurs at parameters which are well in reach of state-of-the-art experiments.