We report experiments in which the vibrations of a micromechanical oscillator are coupled to the motion of Bose-condensed atoms in a trap. The interaction relies on surface forces experienced by the atoms at about 1 microm distance from the mechanical structure. We observe resonant coupling to several well-resolved mechanical modes of the condensate. Coupling via surface forces does not require...

Coupling between mechanical and optical degrees of freedom is strongly enhanced by using subwavelength optical mode profiles. We realize an optomechanical system based on a sliced photonic crystal nanobeam, which combines such highly confined optical fields with a low-mass mechanical mode. Analyzing the transduction of motion and effects of radiation pressure we find the system exhibits a photo...

A hybrid quantum mechanical/molecular dynamics simulation scheme is developed, in which a quantum mechanical system described by the density functional theory on real-space multigrids is embedded in a classical system of atoms interacting via an empirical interatomic potential. Handshake atoms coupling the quantum and the classical systems are treated by a novel scaled position method. The sche...

Electron-vibration coupling in zinc substituted myoglobin has been calculated using a quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical method. The methodology has been tested by a direct comparison of the calculated optical observables, the steady-state optical spectra and three-pulse-photon-echo-peak-shift (3PEPS) function, to those experimentally measured showing a qualitative agreement. A range of ex...

We investigate the collective optomechanics of an ensemble of scatterers inside a Fabry-Pérot resonator and identify an optimized configuration where the ensemble is transmissive, in contrast to the usual reflective optomechanics approach. In this configuration, the optomechanical coupling of a specific collective mechanical mode can be several orders of magnitude larger than the single-element...

We propose a spectrometric method to reconstruct the motional states of mechanical modes in optomechanics. This is achieved by detecting the single-photon emission and scattering spectra of the optomechanical cavity. Owing to an optomechanical coupling, the a priori phonon-state distributions contribute to the spectral magnitude, and hence we can infer information on the phonon states from the ...

Using optical diffraction, we study the mechanical vibrations of an array of micromechanical resonators. Implementing tunable electrostatic coupling between the suspended, doubly-clamped Au beams leads to the formation of a band of collective vibrational modes within these devices. The evolution of these modes with coupling strength is clearly manifested in the optical diffraction pattern of li...

Coupling between tunable broadband modes of an array of plasmonic metamolecules and a vibrational mode of carbonyl bond of poly(methyl methacrylate) is shown experimentally to produce a Fano resonance, which can be tuned in situ by varying the polarization of incident light. The interaction between the plasmon modes and the molecular resonance is investigated using both rigorous electromagnetic...