Heavy Photon States in Photonic Chains of Resonantly Coupled Cavities with Supermonodispersive Microspheres

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a "bottom-up" approach to constructing photonic structures for photon manipulation. Supermonodispersive polymer microspheres are used as building blocks and a size uniformity better than 0.05% could be obtained by sorting the spheres using spectroscopic methods. The spheres are positioned in a V groove on a silicon substrate and form a photonic chain with resonant coupling of the optical whispering-gallery modes. Photonic band modes are clearly observed in fluorescence and resonant scattering spectra, and an excellent agreement with a tight-binding model calculation is found. Heavy photon states and a group index as high as 40 are obtained.

Giant resonant light forces in microspherical photonics

“…Depending on the application, the method of sorting cavites by using resonant light pressure can be a much more accurate and flexible technique compared to standard in-plane fabrication of coupled microrings and microdisks. 52 Microspheres with resonant WGMs can be used as building blocks of delay lines, 30 ultranarrow spectral filters, laser-resonator arrays, 53 waveguides, [29][30][31][32] focusing devices, 54,55 microspectrometers 56 and sensors. 57 Such spheres are also required in biomedical applications 58 where they are used as markers, fluorescent labels and spectral fingerprints.…”

“…This is a highly attractive property for fundamental studies and applications of coupled cavity structures and devices. [28][29][30][31][32][33] It should be noted, however, that although the resonant forces have been observed in microdroplets by the pioneer of optical tweezers himself, Arthur Ashkin, more than 30 years ago, 34 these effects were relatively weakly pronounced. Some evidence for the resonance force enhancement has been obtained in waveguide couplers 35 and in the case of off-axially shifted focused beams.…”

Guiding, bending, and splitting of coupled defect surface modes in a surface-wave photonic crystal

“…Following this concept, waveguiding along the impurity chains in photonic insulators 5 and through coupled defect modes 6 are theoretically investigated and experimental verified [7][8][9] in the context of photonic crystals. However, because photonic crystals work with Bragg interference, the mode profile of these defect modes are generally diffraction-limited, i.e.…”

Ab initiodescription of nonlinear dynamics of coupled microdisk resonators with application to self-trapping dynamics

“…The resulting collective optical excitations in linear regime have been observed experimentally in coupled microspheres and micro-disks [9][10][11] and described theoretically within the framework of ab initio approaches [11][12][13][14]. At the same time, the nonlinear optics of coupled microresonators is still in its infancy.…”