Dramatic shape sensitivity of directional emission patterns from similarly deformed cylindrical polymer lasers

Abstract

Recent experiments on similarly shaped polymer micro-cavity lasers show a dramatic difference in the far-field emission patterns. We show for different deformations of the ellipse, quadrupole and hexadecapole that the large differences in the far-field emission patterns is explained by the differing ray dynamics corresponding to each shape. Analyzing the differences in the appropriate phase space for ray motion, it is shown that the differing geometries of the unstable manifolds of periodic orbits are the decisive factors in determining the far-field pattern. Surprisingly, we find that strongly chaotic ray dynamics is compatible with highly directional emission in the far-field.

Modes of wave-chaotic dielectric resonators

“…Mathematically, the effect of the lens-aperture combination is equivalent to a windowed Fourier transform of the incident field on the lens [24]; thus it is simply connected to the Husimi distributions we have just discussed [61]. Note that infinite aperture limit is simply a Fourier transform of the incident field and we lose all the information about direction sin χ, consistent with our intuition with conjugate variables.…”

“…Several recent experiments have studied dielectric micro-lasers using an imaging technique for data acquisition [11,58,59,61]; the CCD camera records a magnified image of the intensity profile on the sidewall viewed from angle θ in the farfield (see Fig. 14).…”

Uncertainty-Limited Turnstile Transport in Deformed Microcavities

“…Partial barrier localization [2][3][4][5] and the suppression of multiphoton ionization [6] are well-known examples. This suppression phenomenon would become more conspicuous when a Hamiltonian system takes a gradual transition to chaos so that the action transport by chaotic dynamics also increases along the chaotic transition [7,8].Recently, many works have converged to a consensus that the emission directionality in chaotic deformed microcavities is well explained by classical ray dynamics in phase space [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, the evanescent leakage from a symmetric or slightly deformed microcavity is inexplicable by the classical dynamics [17], and thus it is of considerable interest to understand how emission mechanism changes along the chaotic transition.…”

“…Recently, many works have converged to a consensus that the emission directionality in chaotic deformed microcavities is well explained by classical ray dynamics in phase space [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, the evanescent leakage from a symmetric or slightly deformed microcavity is inexplicable by the classical dynamics [17], and thus it is of considerable interest to understand how emission mechanism changes along the chaotic transition.…”

Optical Microcavities as Quantum-Chaotic Model Systems: Openness Makes the Difference!

“…We will not further consider the wave description of active cavities in the present paper. We point out that, interestingly, the ray picture (where no active medium can be accounted for) may provide a very reasonable description of the far-field characteristics even for lasing microcavities [14]. Given the goal of building microlasers with directional emission (which comes close to being the holy grail in this field at present), ray simulations have proven to be a valuable tool even away from the ray limit for λ ≤ R [15].…”