Confinement effects on Brillouin scattering in semiconductor nanowire photonic crystal

Scattering of photons by phonons, or Brillouin scattering, enables manipulation and control of light and has led to revolutionary applications, from slow light to saser and cooling of micromechanical resonators. Recently, enhanced light and sound interaction has been demonstrated in waveguides. However, the design of the waveguide geometry tunes and alters the phonon and photon dispersion simultaneously. Here we investigate, through femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy and theoretical modeling, the light and sound interaction in a bottom-up fabricated vertical nanowire photonic crystal. In such a system, the phonon dispersion can be tuned by varying the geometry of the constituent nanowires. In contrast, the placement of the nanowires in the photonic crystal can be used for tuning optical array modes, without altering the phonon dispersion. We demonstrate the forward and backward scattering, by acoustic phonons in the nanowires, of (1) such optical array modes and (2) guided modes of the constituent nanowires. Furthermore, our results reveal an enhanced interaction of array modes with phonons that we attribute to the specific scattering mechanism. Our results enable the design of a photonic crystal with separately tailored photon and phonon dispersion for Brillouin scattering. We anticipate these advances to be a starting point for enhanced control of light at the nanoscale.