Generation of Ultra-Low Power Phononic Combs

Abstract: We demonstrate excitation of phononic frequency combs in a Bulk Acoustic Wave system at a temperature of $20$mK using a single tone low power signal source. The observed ultra low power threshold is due to a combination of very high quality factor of $4.2\times 10^8$ and relatively strong nonlinear effects. The observed repetition rate of the comb varies from 0.7 to 2Hz and spans over tens of Hertz. The demonstrated system is fully excited via piezoelectricity and does not require mode spectra engineering and external optical or microwave signals. It is shown that the comb profile significantly depends on geometry of excitation and detection electrodes. Observed strong Duffing nonlinearity below the generation threshold suggests that the system is a phononic analogue to Kerr frequency combs excited in monolithic optical microresonators. The ultra-low power regime opens a way of integrating this phononic system with quantum hybrid systems such as impurity defects and superconducting qubits.