Mishkat Bhattacharya, Rochester Institute of Technology
We are in the middle of a revolution in phononics, where it seems useful and possible to control phonons on the mesoscale as we have photons in the last few decades. In this talk I will describe our theoretical proposal and its experimental demonstration (in the group of A.N. Vamivakas)) regarding a phonon laser made of the center-of-mass oscillations of a nanoparticle trapped in an optical tweezer. I will report on threshold behavior, coherence, subthermal number squeezing, time dynamics, phase space characterization, injection locking, Q switching and the role of stimulated emission in our single mode phonon laser. Based on this discussion I will conclude that our device provides a pathway for engineering a coherent source of phonons on the mesoscale that can be applied to both fundamental problems in quantum mechanics as well as tasks of precision metrology.