Combining directional light output and ultralow loss in deformed microdisks

Abstract

A drawback of high-quality modes in optical microdisks is their isotropic light emission characteristics. Here we report a novel, robust, and general mechanism that results in highly directional light emission from those modes. This surprising finding is explained by a combination of wave phenomena (wave localization along unstable periodic ray trajectories) and chaotic ray dynamics in open systems (escape along unstable manifolds). The emission properties originating in the chaotic ray dynamics permit directional light output even from microlasers operating in the common multi-mode regime. We demonstrate our novel mechanism for the limacon billiard family and find directional emission with narrow angular divergence for a significant range of geometries and material parameters.

4 pages

References in corpus (7)

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Asymmetric scattering and non-orthogonal mode patterns in optical micro-spirals
• Dynamical tunneling in mushroom billiards
• Goos-Haenchen shift and localization of optical modes in deformed microcavities
• Fractal Weyl law for chaotic microcavities: Fresnel's laws imply multifractal scattering
• Designing and understanding directional emission from spiral microlasers
• Quality factors and dynamical tunneling in annular microcavities
• Emission from dielectric cavities in terms of invariant sets of the chaotic ray dynamics
• Scarring in open quantum systems
• Chaos-assisted emission from asymmetric resonant cavity microlasers
• Lifetime statistics in chaotic dielectric microresonators
• Distribution of resonances in the quantum open baker map
• Collimated directional emission from a peanut-shaped microresonator
• Optical microcavities as quantum-chaotic model systems: Openness makes the difference!