Quality factors and dynamical tunneling in annular microcavities

TL;DR

This paper links the quality factor of whispering-gallery microcavities to dynamical tunneling, providing an analytical formula that matches numerical solutions and simplifies the analysis of optical losses.

Contribution

It introduces an extended approach for calculating dynamical tunneling rates in open cavities, connecting quantum chaos phenomena to optical quality factors.

Findings

Analytical formula for quality factor derived from dynamical tunneling.

Good agreement between the formula and Maxwell's equations solutions.

Extension of tunneling rate methods to open optical cavities.

Abstract

The key characteristic of an optical mode in a microcavity is its quality factor describing the optical losses. The numerical computation of this quantity can be very demanding for present-day devices. Here we show for a certain class of whispering-gallery cavities that the quality factor is related to dynamical tunneling, a phenomenon studied in the field of quantum chaos. We extend a recently developed approach for determining dynamical tunneling rates to open cavities. This allows us to derive an analytical formula for the quality factor which is in very good agreement with full solutions of Maxwell's equations.