Radiation pressure driven vibrational modes in ultra-high-Q silica microspheres

This work demonstrates silica microspheres that possess ultra-high-Q optical whispering gallery modes, and simultaneously exhibit mechanical modes in the radio frequency range that can be excited by radiation pressure force. In contrast to previous studies that deal with vibrational modes of nanospheres using Raman or Brillouin scattering from ensembles, this work reports the parametric oscillation instability in single microspheres in a large diameter range (35-110 mum).