Lithium Niobate Optomechanical Disk Resonators

Lithium Niobate (LN or just niobate) thin-film micro-photonic resonators have promising prospects in many applications including high efficiency electro-optic modulators, opto-mechanics and nonlinear optics. This paper presents freestanding thin-film lithium niobate optomechanical resonators on a silicon platform using MEMS fabrication technology. We fabricated a 35 micron radiu niobate disk resonator that exhibits high intrinsic optical quality factor (Q) of 484,000. Exploiting the optomechanical interaction from the released free-standing structure and high optical Q, we were able to demonstrate acousto-optic modulation from these devices by exciting the 56 MHz radial breathing mode (mechanical Q of 2700) and 1.9 GHz mechanical mode using a hovering probe.