Leaky Modes of Dielectric Cavities

Abstract

In the absence of external excitation, light trapped within a dielectric medium generally decays by leaking out (and also by getting absorbed within the medium). We analyze the leaky modes of a parallel-plate slab, a solid glass sphere, and a solid glass cylinder, by examining those solutions of Maxwell's equations (for dispersive as well as non-dispersive media) which admit of a complex-valued oscillation frequency. Under certain circumstances, these leaky modes constitute a complete set into which an arbitrary distribution of the electromagnetic field residing inside a dielectric body can be expanded. We provide completeness proofs, and also present results of numerical calculations that illustrate the relationship between the leaky modes and the resonances of dielectric cavities formed by a simple parallel-plate slab, a glass sphere, and a glass cylinder.

20 pages, 10 figures, 79 equations, 8 references

References in corpus (3)

• Resonant state expansion applied to three-dimensional open optical systems
• Resonant-state expansion of dispersive open optical systems
• A roundtrip matrix method for calculating the leaky resonant modes of open nanophotonic structures

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Light interaction with photonic and plasmonic resonances
• Normalization, orthogonality and completeness of quasinormal modes of open systems: the case of electromagnetism
• Modal Expansion of the Scattered Field: Causality, Non-Divergence and Non-Resonant Contribution
• Light propagation and magnon-photon coupling in optically dispersive magnetic media
• Multiple-Order Singularity Expansion Method
• Quasinormal modes expansions for nanoresonators made of absorbing dielectric materials: study of the role of static modes