Microscopic optical buffering in a harmonic potential

TL;DR

This paper proposes a tunable microresonator that can trap, hold, and release optical pulses without distortion, mimicking quantum harmonic oscillators, and offers a solution for microscopic optical buffering in signal processing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tunable microresonator design that emulates quantum harmonic potential for optical pulses, enabling distortion-free optical buffering.

Findings

Optical pulses can be trapped and held without distortion in the microresonator.

The microresonator mimics quantum harmonic oscillator behavior.

Potential application in future optical signal processing devices.

Abstract

In the early days of quantum mechanics, Schr\"odinger noticed that oscillations of a wave packet in a one-dimensional harmonic potential well are periodic and, in contrast to those in anharmonic potential wells, do not experience distortion over time. This original idea did not find applications up to now since an exact one-dimensional harmonic resonator does not exist in nature and has not been created artificially. However, an optical pulse propagating in a bottle microresonator (a dielectric cylinder with a nanoscale-high bump of the effective radius) can exactly imitate a quantum wave packet in the harmonic potential. Here, we propose a tuneable microresonator that can trap an optical pulse completely, hold it as long as the material losses permit, and release it without distortion. This result suggests the solution of the long standing problem of creating a microscopic optical buffer, the key element of the future optical signal processing devices.