Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Micro-Ring Optical Cavity By Engineered Dissipation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to induce unidirectional light propagation in micro-ring optical cavities by engineering dissipation, breaking chiral symmetry through a combination of dissipative and reactive couplings.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to break chiral symmetry in micro-ring resonators using engineered dissipation combined with reactive coupling, verified by numerical simulations.

Findings

Chiral symmetry can be broken via engineered dissipation.

Unidirectional light propagation is achieved in micro-ring cavities.

The method is verified through electromagnetic field simulations.

Abstract

We propose a method to break the chiral symmetry of light in traveling wave resonators by coupling the optical modes to a lossy channel. Through the engineered dissipation, an indirect dissipative coupling between two oppositely propagating modes can be realized. Combining with reactive coupling, it can break the chiral symmetry of the resonator, allowing light propagating only in one direction. The chiral symmetry breaking is numerically verified by the simulation of an electromagnetic field in a micro-ring cavity, with proper refractive index distributions. This work provokes us to emphasize the dissipation engineering in photonics, and the generalized idea can also be applied to other systems.