Experimental realization of sensitivity enhancement and suppression with exceptional surfaces

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates an exceptional surface in a non-Hermitian photonic system, achieving both enhanced sensitivity and suppression of frequency splitting, thus advancing practical sensing applications.

Contribution

It introduces the first experimental realization of an exceptional surface in a photonic sensor, combining sensitivity enhancement with robustness and controllability.

Findings

Sensitivity enhancement observed via resonant frequency splitting.

Suppression of frequency splitting demonstrated around the exceptional surface.

System is simple, robust, and operable near the exceptional surface.

Abstract

By preparing a sensor system around isolated exceptional points, one can obtain a great enhancement of the sensitivity benefiting from the non-Hermiticity. However, this comes at the cost of reduction of the flexibility of the system, which is critical for practical applications. By generalizing the exceptional points to exceptional surfaces, it has been theoretically proposed recently that enhanced sensitivity and flexibility can be combined. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an exceptional surface in a non-Hermitian photonic sensing system, which is composed of a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator and two nanofiber waveguides, resulting in a unidirectional coupling between two degenerate counter-propagating modes with an external optical isolator. The system is simple, robust, and can be easily operated around an exceptional surface. On the one hand, we observe sensitivity enhancement by monitoring the resonant frequency splitting caused by small perturbations. This demonstration of exceptional-surface-enhanced sensitivity paves the way for practical non-Hermitian sensing applications. On the other hand, we also show the suppression of frequency splitting around the exceptional surface for the first time.