Often in physics, new discoveries are made by improving the sensitivities of measurements, such as the recent example of the gravitational wave detector. One way to improve the sensitivities for the measurement and transduction of physical forces is cavity optomechanics. Cavity-optomechanics is an interdisciplinary area of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, optics and quantum physics.It emerged as an independent field of its own only very recently, and utilizes the interaction between mechanical motion and light. Recently featured as the ‘milestone of photon history’ in nature photonics, cavity optomechanics is also one of the chosen fields of interest for Dr. Vibhor Singh, Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Dr. Vibhor has worked extensively in nanomechanical systems during his graduate as well as post doctoral career and has recently joined IISc. He is currently setting up an experimental laboratory to explore various nanomechanical and optomechanical systems.

We all know the story of how computers evolved from mammoth sized calculating machines to miniaturized, user friendly, ubiquitous devices used for anything and everything. Devices of progressively decreasing size and ever increasing capabilities are a necessity of the modern age and are made possible by understanding and taking advantage of the properties of various materials around us in all their different sizes and phases. This is why material science reigns as a field of much research interest and activity.

Nitrogen dioxide is toxic to humans when inhaled. Unfortunately, our noses get anaesthetised when exposed to low levels of nitrogen dioxide. This prevents us from sensing the otherwise acrid gas, creating a possibility for overexposure with harmful effects on health. This may lead to poisoning of the lung, which in some cases might prove to be fatal.

One of the more startling revelations of Physics in the last century has been the idea that Quantum Physics, far from being an exotic theory, is probably the standard description of our world, and that classical physics is merely an approximation at large length scales. Even from a purely geometrical point of view, the properties of materials become interesting as we approach the nanometre scale. The volume of simple shapes decreases faster than their surface area does, as the shape is uniformly shrunk from all directions. The resulting zero-dimensional structures called quantum dots, are not the only way to reduce a material’s size. When a cube’s length and breadth are kept the same but its thickness is reduced to a few atoms in extent, the resulting “nanosheet” has almost no volume, while still having a high surface area. Materials like Graphene, Molybdenum disulphide and Topological Insulators belong to the class of such two-dimensional (2D) materials. Certain other materials such as Silver and Phosphorus in Germanium can be shrunk into so-called ‘nanowires’, in which both width and thickness are reduced to nanometres. These one-dimensional (1D) systems have neither surface area nor volume, but only length.