Brillouin scattering induced transparency and non-reciprocal light storage

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is a very fundamental interaction between light and travelling acoustic waves, which is mainly attributed to the electrostriction and photoelastic effects with the interaction strength being orders of magnitude larger than other nonlinearities. Although various photonic applications for all-optical light controlling based on SBS have been achieved in optical fiber and waveguides, the coherent light-acoustic interaction remains a challenge. Here, we experimentally demonstrated the Brillouin scattering induced transparency (BSIT) in a high quality optical microresonantor. Benefited from the triple-resonance in the whispering gallery cavity, the photon-phonon interaction is enhanced, and enables the light storage to the phonon, which has lifetime up to 10us. In addition, due to the phase matching condition, the stored circulating acoustic phonon can only interact with certain direction light, which leads to non-reciprocal light storage and retrieval. Our work paves the way towards the low power consumption integrated all-optical switching, isolator and circulator, as well as quantum memory.
Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures