Triggering extreme events at the nanoscale in photonic seas

Abstract

Hurricanes, tsunami, rogue waves and tornadoes are rare natural phenomena that embed an exceptionally large amount of energy, which appears and quickly disappears in a probabilistic fashion. This makes them difficult to predict and hard to generate on demand. Here we demonstrate that we can trigger the onset of rare events akin to rogue waves controllably, while we can systematically use their generation to break the diffraction limit of light propagation. We illustrate this phenomenon in the interesting case of a random field, where energy oscillates among incoherent degrees of freedom. Despite the low energy carried by each wave, we illustrate how to control a mechanism of spontaneous synchronization, which constructively builds up the spectral energy available in the whole bandwidth of the field into giant coherent structures, whose statistics is perfectly predictable. The larger the frequency bandwidth of the random field, the larger the amplitude of rare events that are built up by this mechanism. Our system is composed of an integrated optical resonator, realized on a photonic crystal chip. Trough near field imaging experiments, we record the most confined rogue waves ever reported, characterized by a spatial localization of 206 µm and with ultrashort duration of 163 fs at the wavelength λ = 1.55 µm. Quite remarkably, such localized energy patterns are formed in a deterministic dielectric structure that does not require nonlinear properties. * andrea.fratalocchi@kaust.edu.sa; www.primalight.org

Engineering complex nanolasers: from spaser quantum information sources to near-field anapole lasers

“…(1) and (2) inside the Finite-Differences-in-Time-Domain (FDTD) framework using our massively parallel FDTD simulator NANOCPP. [21][22][23] More specifically, we used a novel computational approach which explicitly takes into account the presence of material dispersion. In all our simulations the computational domain was organized as follows: the nanolaser was placed in the center of a box with 2µm side, while the spatial resolution in air was set as 2.5nm.…”

SPASER as a complex system: femtosecond dynamics traced by ab-initio simulations

“…(1) and (2) inside the Finite-Differences-in-Time-Domain (FDTD) framework using our massively parallel FDTD simulator NANOCPP. 15,16 More specifically, we used a novel computational approach which explicitly takes into account the presence of material dispersion. 17 In our simulations the computational domain was organized as follows: the spaser was placed in the center of a box with 1µm side, and each spatial direction was discretized with 400 points (spatial resolution in air: 2.5nm).…”

A liquid of optical vortices in a photonic sea of vector waves

“…Chaotic systems are everywhere around us, and unearthing correlations in their structure is a powerful route towards understanding them. With respect to optics, the investigation of random wave fields has already led to outstanding phenomena like the Anderson localization of light [1], or to more recent fascinating observations as rogue waves in photonic seas [2]. However, when considering the structure of a random wave field is useful to recognize the presence of deep-subwavelength dislocations known as phase singularities [3].…”

“…The shape of this chaotic cavity is a quarter of a stadium, so that the resulting field pattern consists of a superposition of plane waves interfering with the same momentum k and random phases δ k [2], i.e.,…”