Nano-opto-mechanical metamaterials on semiconductor nanomembranes provides a platform for the study of materials with exotic optical properties, nanomechanics, phonon-photon interactions, time-varying media and collective dynamics. The atomic scale dynamics of thermal vibrations in such metamaterials play a crucial role in understanding their behavior and potential applications. I will firstly talk about our recent development on picometer scale visualization and localization techniques with electron beams and topologically structured light allowing the measurement of atomic level displacements in nano-opto-mechanical metamaterials systems and the study of ballistic dynamics of thermal movements. Then, I will talk about optical parametric control of Langevin dynamics in a nano-opto-mechanical metamaterials system and phononic frequency comb generation at microwatt power level. In particular flexible plasmonic metamaterial arrays function as a powerful platform to investigate classical many-body effects in the strongly correlated regime induced by light that complements the cold atom and spin platforms where many-body quantum states of bosonic or fermionic matter can be studied. Among these many-body strongly correlated systems is the time crystal that is an eagerly sought phase of matter with broken time-translation symmetry. We demonstrate experimentally that a classical metamaterial nanostructure exhibit complex picometer scale dynamics in presence of light, can be driven to a continuous time crystal state.
Host: Jack Harris (jack.harris@yale.edu)
