Photon-echo-like phenomenon induced by a phonon

Photon-phonon interaction is a powerful mechanism for all-optical signal processing, slow (fast) light, microscopy, spectroscopy, microwave photonics, and sensing. Here, we demonstrate a photon-echo-like phenomenon induced by a phonon, whose mechanism is represented by a coherent photon-phonon chain interaction (PPCI) theory referring to the alternating evolution between Stokes scattering and anti-Stokes scattering. An analytical solution, including the impulse response of the coherent PPCI theory, is derived to quantitatively analyze the energy conversion between photon and phonon, showing a damped photoacoustic oscillation. All theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, and experiments confirm that the adjacent order echoes have a phase difference of π, i.e., phase flip, and the echoes generated by using photon and phonon as the initial excitation sources, respectively, are in inverse phase. As a result, the echoes up to the third-order are theoretically analyzed by the proposed coherent PPCI theory and verified by the experiment. This physical mechanism bodes well for a class of photonics applications in telecommunications, optical metrology, and optical computation.