Diamond Resonator: How to Catch a Loud Echo express
A tiny diamond bridge vibrates so strongly that it starts to 'sing' at many frequencies at once. Previously, such vibrations would dampen themselves: the harder the resonator swung, the harder it was to add energy. Physicists found a loophole in this rule.
They used light to drive the diamond. Light pushes on the bridge, making it tremble. Usually, this trembling quickly plateaus — further pumping is useless. But in the new experiment, the scientists noticed that the system has two stable states: one with weak vibrations, the other with strong ones. If you give the system a gentle nudge, it jumps to the second state and vibrates almost ten times stronger.
They dubbed this trick 'nonlinear attractor engineering.' An attractor is a state the system tends toward on its own, like a ball rolling into a pit. If the landscape has two pits of different depths, you can learn to toss the ball from the shallow one into the deep one. Here, the deep pit corresponds to strong vibrations.
The practical benefits are huge: such resonators could become ultra-sensitive sensors, operate at room temperature, and even help couple light to the magnetic properties of diamond. Plus, it's a step toward compact sources of many light frequencies — ones that currently occupy entire optical tables.
Diamond is not just a gemstone but also one of the best materials for optomechanics: it is very stiff and conducts heat well, so its vibrations barely decay.
In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 'The Fountains of Paradise,' a super-strong material of the future is described — possibly diamond filaments that could withstand monstrous vibrations, similar to those studied in optomechanics.