Injection locking of an electro-optomechanical device

Advances in optomechanics have enabled significant achievements in precision sensing and control of matter, including detection of gravitational waves and cooling of mechanical systems to their quantum ground states. Recently, the inherent nonlinearity in the optomechanical interaction has been harnessed to explore synchronization effects, including the spontaneous locking of an oscillator to a reference injection signal delivered via the optical field. Here, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of a radiation-pressure-driven optomechanical system locking to an inertial drive, with actuation provided by an integrated electrical interface. We use the injection signal to suppress the drift in the optomechanical oscillation frequency, strongly reducing phase noise by over 55 dBc/Hz at 2 Hz offset. We further employ the injection tone to tune the oscillation frequency by more than 2 million times its narrowed linewidth. In addition, we uncover previously unreported synchronization dynamics, enabled by the independence of the inertial drive from the optical drive field. Finally, we show that our approach may enable control of the optomechanical gain competition between different mechanical modes of a single resonator. The electrical interface allows enhanced scalability for future applications involving arrays of injection-locked precision sensors. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America