Hyperfine phononic frequency comb

Abstract

Optical frequency combs [1-8] have resulted in significant advances in optical frequency metrology and found wide application to precise physical measurements [1-4, 9] and molecular fingerprinting [8]. A direct analogue of frequency combs in the phononic or acoustic domain has not been reported to date. In this letter, we report the first clear experimental evidence for a phononic frequency comb. In contrast to the Kerr nonlinearity [10] in optical frequency comb formation, the phononic frequency comb is generated through the intrinsic coupling of a driven phonon mode with an auto-parametrically excited sub-harmonic mode [16]. Through systematic experiments at different drive frequencies and amplitudes, we portray the well-connected process of phononic frequency comb formation and define attributes to control the features [17-18] associated with comb formation in such a system. Further, the interplay between these nonlinear resonances and the well-known Duffing phenomenon [12-14] is also observed. The presented pathway for phononic frequency comb formation finds general relevance to other nonlinear systems in both classical and quantum domains.