Abstract

Phononic frequency combs (PFC) are the mechanical analogues of celebrated photonic frequency combs. These represent a newly documented physical phenomenon in the well-researched physical domain of mechanical resonators [1]. The emergence of PFC is mediated by nonlinear modal coupling. Through a series of experiments using micromechanical resonators, various physical features of PFC have been identified. These include drive parameters for comb operation, hysteresis for comb spectrum tailoring and nonlinear sensitivity to physical perturbations. My talk will describe the physics of PFC and will emphasize how these combs could be foundational to the fields of materials science, molecular science and chemical science. In that respect, I will present our first conceptual demonstrations of material combs, molecular combs and chemical combs respectively. I will also showcase our recent demonstrations of broadband PFC using optical tweezers [2] and phonon lasers [3]. The future work will be focused on the applications of PFC in sensing, communications and quantum information science.

1. Ganesan, A., Do, C. and Seshia, A., 2017. Phononic frequency comb via intrinsic three-wave mixing. Physical review letters, 118(3), p.033903.
2. de Jong, M.H., Ganesan, A., Cupertino, A., Gröblacher, S. and Norte, R.A., 2023. Mechanical overtone frequency combs. Nature Communications, 14(1), p.1458.
3. Xiao, G., Feng, Z., Kuang, T., Huang, R. et al., 2026. Ultrabroadband phonon laser frequency comb. Advanced Photonics, 8(2), pp.026004-026004.