Imagine a guitar string strummed more than a billion times a second. No human can hear the sound, but this ultra-high-frequency hum may one day power the world’s most sensitive transducers or help to unlock the secrets of the quantum realm.
Described in a study published in Photonics Research and selected for inclusion in Spotlight on Optics, researchers at the University of Florida and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have built a chip-sized device that uses forces exerted by photons to “strum” a single-crystal 4H silicon carbide (SiC) microdisk, inducing it to vibrate at frequencies that can be detected with the right techniques and equipment.
The research may open new doors to integrated sensing technologies that could operate from deep-sea labs to distant space probes.
Read more about Turning Up the Light: Harnessing the Potential of Silicon Carbide in Optomechanical Devices.
