Acoustic whispering-gallery modes generated and dynamically imaged with ultrashort optical pulses

Broadband coherent surface phonon wave packets up to 1 GHz in a microscopic embedded disk are excited and dynamically imaged with ultrashort optical pulses. We isolate a whispering-gallery-like mode using a technique involving quadrature detection of the out-of-plane surface motion on modulating the optical excitation beam. The eigenmode distribution is obtained from spatiotemporal Fourier transforms and a radial-azimuthal decomposition demonstrates the selective excitation of a mode with 26-fold rotational symmetry and allows an estimate of the cavity Q factor to be made.