Switching and amplification in disordered lasing resonators

Abstract

Controlling the flow of energy in a random medium is a research frontier with a wide range of applications. As recently demonstrated, the effect of disorder on the transmission of optical beams, may be partially compensated by wavefront shaping, but losing control over individual light paths. Here we report on a novel physical effect whereby energy is spatially and spectrally transferred inside a disordered active medium by the coupling between individual lasing modes. We show that is possible to transmit an optical resonance to a remote point by employing specific control over optical excitations. The observed nonlinear transport bears some analogies to a field-effect transistor for light, which acts as a switch and as an amplifier.

References in corpus (5)

• Anderson localization of entangled photons in an integrated quantum walk
• The mode-locking transition of random lasers
• Active subnanometer spectral control of a random laser
• Observation of spatial quantum correlations induced by multiple scattering of non-classical light
• Tunable degree of localization in random lasers with controlled interaction

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• Random-laser dynamics with temporally modulated pump
• Statistical distribution of quantum correlation induced by multiple scattering in the disordered medium
• Modulating quantum fluctuations of scattered lights in disordered media via wavefront shaping
• Disorder-induced light trapping enhanced by pulse collisions in one-dimensional nonlinear photonic crystals
• Momentum selection for enhanced adaptive focusing through semi-transparent media
• Different regimes of ultrashort pulse propagation in disordered layered media with resonant loss and gain