Micromechanical resonator performance is fundamentally limited by the coupling to a thermal environment. The magnitude of this thermodynamical effect is typically considered in accordance with a physical temperature, assumed to be uniform across the resonator’s physical span. However, in some circumstances, e.g., quantum optomechanics or interferometric gravitational wave detection, the temperature of the resonator may not be uniform, resulting in the resonator being thermally linked to a spatially varying thermal bath. In this case, the link of a mode of interest to its thermal environment is less straightforward to understand. Here, we engineer a distributed bath on a germane optomechanical platform—a phononic crystal—and utilize both highly localized and extended resonator modes to probe the spatially varying bath in entirely different bath regimes.
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