Active control of emission directionality of semiconductor microdisk lasers

Liew, Seng Fatt; Redding, Brandon; Li, Ge; Solomon, Glenn S.; Cao, Hui

doi:10.1063/1.4883637

Cited by 88 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In any real-world implementation of a ring laser or microdisk laser, the rotational symmetry will be slightly broken due to inhomogeneities in the material or by imperfections of the manufacturing process [30,53]. While intuitively one would expect that a slight modification of the system should not change the structure of the lasing solutions, there is evidence that this symmetry breaking can have a strong effect on the lasing modes [53,54].…”

Section: Example 2: 1d Ring Laser With Broken Symmetrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, a much more efficient approach named steady state ab initio lasing theory (SALT) has emerged, which can be used to describe the steady-state lasing of lasers [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Among other advances, this new framework has shed light on weakly-scattering random lasers [24], on pump-induced exceptional points [11,12,25,26] and on coherent perfect absorption [27,28] and has opened up new ways of controlling the emission patterns of random as well as of microcavity lasers [29,30]. One of the major drawbacks of SALT is that its conventional formulation fails for the simulation of microlasers with nearly degenerate modes as occurring, e.g., in whispering gallery mode resonators with an inherent symmetry [2,6,8,10,12,31].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Steady-stateab initiolaser theory for fully or nearly degenerate cavity modes

et al. 2015

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We investigate the range of validity of the recently developed steady-state ab-initio laser theory (SALT). While very efficient in describing various microlasers, SALT is conventionally believed not to be applicable to lasers featuring fully or nearly degenerate pairs of resonator modes above the lasing threshold. Here we demonstrate how SALT can indeed be extended to describe such cases as well, with the effect that we significantly broaden the theory's scope. In particular, we show how to use SALT in conjunction with a linear stability analysis to obtain stable single-mode lasing solutions that involve a degenerate mode pair. Our flexible and efficient approach is tested on one-dimensional ring lasers as well as on two-dimensional microdisk lasers with broken symmetry.

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Section: Example 2: 1d Ring Laser With Broken Symmetrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Steady-stateab initiolaser theory for fully or nearly degenerate cavity modes

et al. 2015

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“…From the time reversal point of view, directional emission implies directional excitation, namely, free-space propagating beams can be efficiently coupled into microcavities (Lee et al, 2007b;Liu et al, 2012). More recently, active control of emission directionality of semiconductor microdisk lasers has been demonstrated by shaping the spatial profile of the pump (Liew et al, 2014).…”

Section: Summary and Prospectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dielectric microcavities: Model systems for wave chaos and non-Hermitian physics

2015

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“…From the relation of ground-state Berry phase, a unique genus by quantum phase invariant may exist in non-Hermitian systems, leading to a novel robust interface state if transiting from complete PT symmetry (Phase I with gain/loss amplitude γ 1 ) to PT breaking (Phase III with gain/loss amplitude γ 2 ). This interface between different quantum phases can be manipulated by controlling the gain/loss contrast with the selective pumping strategie 38 , exhibiting great freedom and tenability compared to topological photonics. The general solution of the interface state is which ensures that the interface state energy stays unchanged at the middle of the band gap of the Phase I lattice.…”

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confidence: 99%

Robust Light State by Quantum Phase Transition in Non-Hermitian Optical Materials

Zhao

Longhi

Feng

2016

Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

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Robust light transport is the heart of optical information processing, leading to the search for robust light states by topological engineering of material properties. Here, it is shown that quantum phase transition, rather than topology, can be strategically exploited to design a novel robust light state. We consider an interface between parity-time (PT) symmetric media with different quantum phases and use complex Berry phase to reveal the associated quantum phase transition and topological nature. While the system possesses the same topological order within different quantum phases, phase transition from PT symmetry to PT breaking across the interface in the synthetic non-Hermitian metamaterial system facilitates novel interface states, which are robust against a variety of gain/loss perturbations and topological impurities and disorder. The discovery of the robust light state by quantum phase transition may promise fault-tolerant light transport in optical communications and computing.Metamaterials have offered a new paradigm of designing unprecedented material properties, revolutionizing our fundamental understanding in optics 1 . While in the past the design of metamaterials was mainly focused on the real permittivity-permeability plane, the emergence of parity-time (PT) symmetry 2 for non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in quantum field theory has been guiding the studies of metamaterials into the entire dielectric permittivity plane with a delicate interplay of index, gain and loss [3][4][5][6] . In spite of non-Hermiticity, completely real eigen spectra, corresponding to PT symmetric phase, can still be expected. By increasing the gain/loss contrast, the eigen spectra become complex and the system can transit into PT broken phase [3][4][5][6] . Recent investigations of PT symmetric metamaterials have enabled a variety of intriguing optical phenomena, including effective manipulation of cavity oscillating modes [7][8][9] and unidirectional light transport [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] , which promise new functionalities for integrated photonics information processing.To secure fault-tolerant light transport for optical communications, robust optical interface states, inspired by topological insulators and quantum Hall systems in condensed-matter physics, have been developed [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] . From a topological perspective, a system can acquire a non-negligible geometric phase (also called Berry phase) under a cyclic and adiabatic variation in a parameter space, which classifies the topological orders of matter 24 . An important signature of topological effects is the presence of topological states at the interface between two media with different topological orders. Because of the persistent Berry phase underlying each topological order, the interface states are topologically protected against local perturbations to the interface. In optics, topological light states are immune to backscattering of light 25 , promising applications in optical information processing 26 . Nevertheless, these robust light...

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Active control of emission directionality of semiconductor microdisk lasers

Cited by 88 publications

References 31 publications

Steady-stateab initiolaser theory for fully or nearly degenerate cavity modes

Steady-stateab initiolaser theory for fully or nearly degenerate cavity modes

Dielectric microcavities: Model systems for wave chaos and non-Hermitian physics

Robust Light State by Quantum Phase Transition in Non-Hermitian Optical Materials

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