Chaos-assisted directional light emission from microcavity lasers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how dynamical tunneling in ray-chaotic microcavities leads to directional light emission, confirmed through experiments and theoretical analysis of unstable manifolds.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence linking dynamical tunneling to directional emission in microcavities with a detailed theoretical explanation.

Findings

Directional emission results from tunneling to chaotic modes

Experimental observations match theoretical predictions

Unstable manifolds explain emission directionality

Abstract

We study the effect of dynamical tunneling on emission from ray-chaotic microcavities by introducing a suitably designed deformed disk cavity. We focus on its high quality factor modes strongly localized along a stable periodic ray orbit confined by total internal reflection. It is shown that dominant emission originates from the tunneling from the periodic ray orbit to chaotic ones; the latter eventually escape from the cavity refractively, resulting in directional emission that is unexpected from the geometry of the periodic orbit, but fully explained by unstable manifolds of chaotic ray dynamics. Experimentally performing selective excitation of those modes, we succeeded in observing the directional emission in good agreement with theoretical prediction. This provides decisive experimental evidence of dynamical tunneling in a ray-chaotic microcavity.