Enhancement and inhibition of light tunneling mediated by resonant mode conversion

Abstract

We show that the rate at which light tunnels between neighboring multimode waveguides can be drastically increased or reduced by the presence of small longitudinal periodic modulations of the waveguide properties that stimulate resonant conversion between eigenmodes of each waveguide. Such a conversion, available only in multimode guiding structures, leads to periodic power transfer into higher-order modes, whose tails may considerably overlap with neighboring waveguides. As a result, the effective coupling constant for neighboring waveguides may change by several orders of magnitude upon small variations in the longitudinal modulation parameters.

4 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Optics Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Visualization of Coherent Destruction of Tunneling in an Optical Double Well System
• Resonant mode flopping in modulated waveguiding structures
• Diffraction-managed solitons and nonlinear beam diffusion in modulated arrays of optical waveguides

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Resonant Bloch-wave beatings