Optically excited nanoscale ultrasonic transducers.

In order to work at higher ultrasonic frequencies, for instance, to increase the resolution, it is necessary to fabricate smaller and higher frequency transducers. This paper presents an ultrasonic transducer capable of being made at a very small size and operated at GHz frequencies. The transducers are activated and read optically using pulsed lasers and without physical contact between the instrumentation and the transducer. This removes some of the practical impediments of traditional piezoelectric architectures (such as wiring) and allows the devices to be placed immediately on or within samples, reducing the significant effect of attenuation which is very strong at frequencies above 1 GHz. The transducers presented in this paper exploit simultaneous optical and mechanical resonances to couple the optical input into ultrasonic waves and vice versa. This paper discusses the mechanical and optical design of the devices at a modest scale (a few µm) and explores the scaling of the transducers toward the sub-micron scale. Results are presented that show how the transducers response changes depending on its local environment and how the resonant frequency shifts when the transducer is loaded by a printed protein sample.

Transient two-wave mixing in a linear configuration of an adaptive interferometer based on Er-doped fiber with saturable absorption.

We report results of transient two-wave mixing (TWM) in Er-doped fibers with saturable absorption in a linear configuration of an adaptive interferometric vibrometer with essentially different powers of recording waves. The TWM signal modulation depth detected in the weak (reflected) wave was shown to be twice as strong as in the symmetric configuration with equal recording powers. In accordance with theoretical predictions, the experimentally observed TWM signal amplitude grew continuously with the fiber optical density in the whole investigated range of alpha(0)L approximately 0.2-4. At the recording wavelength 1492 nm it proved to be quite close to the theoretical limit of approximately alpha(0)L/2 for weakly absorbing fibers, and in 1-m-long fiber of high optical density reached maximal value of approximately 0.8. The TWM response time went down with the recording light power and for P(0) approximately 10 mW was in the submillisecond region.