Phase Space Engineering in Optical Microcavities I: Preserving near-field uniformity while inducing far-field directionality

TL;DR

This paper investigates how altering the cavity-hole distance in annular optical microcavities can induce far-field directionality while maintaining near-field uniformity and high quality factors, supported by modeling and numerical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control far-field emission directionality in microcavities without compromising near-field uniformity, using cavity geometry modifications.

Findings

Increasing cavity-hole distance d enhances far-field directionality.

The transition from uniform to directional far-field is abrupt.

A simple model explains the observed behavior.

Abstract

Optical microcavities have received much attention over the last decade from different research fields ranging from fundamental issues of cavity QED to specific applications such as microlasers and bio-sensors. A major issue in the latter applications is the difficulty to obtain directional emission of light in the far-field while keeping high energy densities inside the cavity (i.e. high quality factor). To improve our understanding of these systems, we have studied the annular cavity (a dielectric disk with a circular hole), where the distance cavity-hole centers, d, is used as a parameter to alter the properties of cavity resonances. We present results showing how one can affect the directionality of the far-field while preserving the uniformity (hence the quality factor) of the near-field simply by increasing the value of d. Interestingly, the transition between a uniform near- and far-field to a uniform near- and directional far-field is rather abrupt. We can explain this behavior quite nicely with a simple model, supported by full numerical calculations, and we predict that the effect will also be found in a large class of eigenmodes of the cavity.