Nonreciprocity Steered with a Spinning Resonator

Abstract

An approach is presented to study the controllable nonreciprocal transmission in a spinning resonator. It has been demonstrated in optomechanics that an optical signal field can only be affected when it propagates in the same direction as the driving field. We show that such an optomechanically induced nonreciprocity can be controlled by rotating the resonator, which introduces a frequency shift with different signs for clockwise and counterclockwise optical fields in the resonator. In our scheme, the transmission probabilities of the clockwise and counterclockwise input signal fields can be reversed by tuning the rotation velocity of the resonator. By studying the transmission spectra of the signal field, we also reveal that the nonreciprocity response can be realized in the spinning resonators in the absence of optomechanical coupling, which extends its utility.