Conformal optical black hole for cavity

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optical black hole cavity that uses transformation optics to eliminate radiation loss in whispering gallery modes, achieving high Q-factors and tight confinement, with potential applications across various wave systems.

Contribution

The work presents a novel OBH cavity design that completely inhibits radiation loss in WGMs using transformation optics and conformal mapping, demonstrated experimentally in microwave frequencies.

Findings

Q-factor enhancement observed in microwave spectra

WGM fields follow a $1/r^$ decay rule

Design strategy applicable to various wave systems

Abstract

Whispering gallery mode (WGM) cavity is important for exploring physics of strong light-matter interaction. Yet it suffers from the notorious radiation loss universally due to the light tunneling effect through the curved boundary. In this work, we propose and demonstrate an optical black hole (OBH) cavity based on transformation optics. The radiation loss of all WGMs in OBH cavity is completely inhibited by an infinite wide potential barrier. Besides, the WGM field outside the cavity is revealed to follow $1/r^\alpha$ decay rule based on conformal mapping, which is fundamentally different from the conventional Hankel-function distributions in a homogeneous cavity. Experimentally, a truncated OBH cavity is achieved based on the effective medium theory, and both the Q-factor enhancement and tightly confined WGM field are measured in the microwave spectra which agree well with the theoretical results. The circular OBH cavity is further applied to the arbitrary-shaped cavities including single-core and multi-core structures with high-Q factor via the conformal mapping. The OBH cavity design strategy can be generalized to resonant modes of various wave systems, such as acoustic and elastic waves, and finds applications in energy harvesting and optoelectronics.