Launching directional hypersonic surface waves in monolithic gallium phosphide nanodisks: two holes are better than one

Abstract

The emergence and rapid progress of all-dielectric nanoantennas have provided unprecedented platforms for applications in sensing, optical control of light, opto-mechanics and metrology at the nanoscale. We present a general figure-of-merit (FOM) considering both optical and vibrational responses. Detectable mechanical vibrations ranging from gigahertz to terahertz in gallium phosphide (GaP) structures on sub-wavelength scales are found to surpass their metallic counterparts in a 400–800 nm pump–probe configuration. Then, we tailored low-aspect ratio GaP disks being probed near their optical anapole resonance. We further broke the isotropy of the nanodisks and achieved pronounced directional propagation for launching surface acoustic waves (SAWs) with a double-hole structure rather than with a one-hole configuration, which could be attributed to the constructive superposition of vibration induced by the two holes in the appropriate direction. Finally, we demonstrated that the orbital angular momentum of SAWs could be generated with a spiral distribution of the two-hole nanodisks. Our work paves a new way to monolithic GaP nanoantennas towards photoacoustic applications such as hypersound routers, stirring up inverse designs of individual antennas for phononic metasurfaces, topological phononics as well as quantum phononics.