We theoretically study topological laser operation in a bosonic Harper-Hofstadter model featuring a saturable optical gain. Crucial consequences of the chirality of the lasing edge modes are highlighted, such as a sharp dependence of the lasing threshold on the geometrical shape of the amplifying region and the possibility of ultraslow relaxation times and of convectively unstable regimes. The different unstable regimes are characterized in terms of spatio-temporal structures sustained by noise and a strong amplification of a propagating probe beam is anticipated to occur in between the convective and the absolute (lasing) thresholds. The robustness of topological laser operation against static disorder is assessed.
We investigate signatures of a self-trapping transition in the driven-dissipative Bose Hubbard dimer, in presence of incoherent pump and single-particle losses. For fully symmetric couplings the stationary state density matrix is independent of any Hamiltonian parameter, and cannot therefore capture the competition between hopping-induced delocalization and the interaction-dominated self-trapping regime. We focus instead on the exact quantum dynamics of the particle imbalance after the system is prepared in a variety of initial states, and on the frequency-resolved spectral properties of the steady state, as encoded in the single-particle Green’s functions. We find clear signatures of a localization-delocalization crossover as a function of hopping to interaction ratio. We further show that a finite a pump-loss asymmetry restores a delocalization crossover in the steady-state imbalance and leads to a finite intra-dimer dissipation.
We develop a semiclassical theory of laser oscillation into a chiral edge state of a topological photonic system endowed with a frequency-dependent gain. As an archetypal model of this physics, we consider a Harper–Hofstadter lattice embedding population-inverted, two-level atoms as a gain material. We show that a suitable design of the spatial distribution of gain and its spectral shape provides flexible mode-selection mechanisms that can stabilize single-mode lasing into an edge state. Implications of our results for recent experiments are outlined.
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