Chaos-assisted emission from asymmetric resonant cavity microlasers

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chaos-assisted emission influences directional light emission in asymmetric resonant cavity microlasers, combining numerical analysis and experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of chaos-assisted emission in asymmetric resonant cavities and demonstrates experimental control over directional emission in microlasers.

Findings

Directional emission observed in asymmetric cavities

Chaos-assisted emission explained by dynamical tunneling

Selective excitation of modes achieved experimentally

Abstract

We study emission from quasi-one-dimensional modes of an asymmetric resonant cavity that are associated with a stable periodic ray orbit confined inside the cavity by total internal reflection. It is numerically demonstrated that such modes exhibit directional emission, which is explained by chaos-assisted emission induced by dynamical tunneling. Fabricating semiconductor microlasers with the asymmetric resonant cavity, we experimentally demonstrate the selective excitation of the quasi-one-dimensional modes by employing the device structure to preferentially inject currents to these modes and observe directional emission in good accordance with the theoretical prediction based on chaos-assisted emission.