No Arabic abstract
We introduce a class of unidirectional lasing modes associated with the frozen mode regime of non-reciprocal slow-wave structures. Such asymmetric modes can only exist in cavities with broken time-reversal and space inversion symmetries. Their lasing frequency coincides with a spectral stationary inflection point of the underlying passive structure and is virtually independent of its size. These unidirectional lasers can be indispensable components of photonic integrated circuitry.
Lasers differ from other light sources in that they are coherent, and their coherence makes them indispensable to both fundamental research and practical application. In optomechanical cavities, phonon and photon lasing is facilitated by the ability of photons and phonons to interact intensively and excite one another coherently. The lasing linewidths of both phonons and photons are critical for practical application. However, thus far, these linewidths have not been explored in detail in cavity optomechanical systems. This study investigates the underlying dynamics of lasing in optomechanical cavities and experimentally demonstrates simultaneous photon and phonon lasing with narrow linewidths in a silicon optomechanical crystal cavity. We find that the linewidths can be accounted for by two distinct physical mechanisms in two regimes, namely the normal regime and the reversed regime, where the intrinsic optical decay rate is either larger or smaller than the intrinsic mechanical decay rate. In the normal regime, an ultra-narrow spectral linewidth of 5.4 kHz for phonon lasing at 6.22 GHz can be achieved regardless of the linewidth of the pump light, while these results are counterintuitively unattainable for photon lasing in the reversed regime. These results pave the way towards harnessing the coherence of both photons and phonons in silicon photonic devices and reshaping their spectra, potentially opening up new technologies in sensing, metrology, spectroscopy, and signal processing, as well as in applications requiring sources that offer an ultra-high degree of coherence.
We report on experiments with deformed polymer microlasers that have a low refractive index and exhibit unidirectional light emission. We demonstrate that the highly directional emission is due to transport of light rays along the unstable manifold of the chaotic saddle in phase space. Experiments, ray-tracing simulations, and mode calculations show very good agreement.
Plasmonics aims to interface photonics and electronics. Finding optical, near-field analogues of much used electro-technical components is crucial to the success of such a platform. Here we present the plasmonic analogue of a non-reciprocal antenna. For non-reciprocality in a plasmonic context, the optical excitation and emission resonances of the antenna need to be an orthogonal set. We show that nonlinear excitation of metal nanoantennas creates a sufficient shift between excitation and emission wavelengths that they can be interpreted as decoupled, allowing for independent tuning of excitation and emission properties along different spatial dimensions. This leads, for given excitation wavelength and polarization, to independent optimization of emission intensity, frequency spectrum, polarization and angular spectrum. Non-reciprocal optical antennas of both gold and aluminum are characterized and shown to be useful as e.g. nonlinear signal transducers or nanoscale sources of widely tunable light.
The regime of strong light-matter coupling is typically associated with weak excitation. With current realizations of cavity-QED systems, strong coupling may persevere even at elevated excitation levels sufficient to cross the threshold to lasing. In the presence of stimulated emission, the vacuum-Rabi doublet in the emission spectrum is modified and the established criterion for strong coupling no longer applies. We provide a generalized criterion for strong coupling and the corresponding emission spectrum, which includes the influence of higher Jaynes-Cummings states. The applicability is demonstrated in a theory-experiment comparison of a few-emitter quantum-dot--micropillar laser as a particular realization of the driven dissipative Jaynes-Cummings model. Furthermore, we address the question if and for which parameters true single-emitter lasing can be achieved, and provide evidence for the coexistence of strong coupling and lasing in our system in the presence of background emitter contributions.
Optical activity, the power of a medium to rotate the polarization of a light beam, has contributed significantly to molecular structure assessments in stereochemistry, biomolecular science and crystallography. Thus far, it is commonly believed that optical activity is manifested only in the chiral media which can give rise to circular birefringence of light. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that free space can also support the implementation of non-reciprocal optical activity with Bessel beams by spin-orbital interaction. Specifically, non-diffractive optically active beams are realized, with their optical rotatory power readily controlled by simple optical elements. We show that such free-space optical activity can be exploited to form non-reciprocal optical components such as polarization rotators, isolators, and circulators. Our results may bring about new possibilities of media-independent optical activity to other transverse waves ranging from radio to optical frequencies.