Chaotic Cavity News

Whispering gallery at the gallery

Wave patterns in classically chaotic cavities are often visually striking. A plot of ours, showing a folded chaotic whispering-gallery mode, was chosen as one of the winners in the 2020 ArtSci Oregon competition. All entries can be found at the 2020 Research as Art Exhibition web site.

Folding the whispering gallery

Our electromagnetic simulation of a folded chaotic whispering-gallery mode was featured on the Kaleidoscope page of Physical Review A for December 2019. For a brief description of the work, see this page.

Beyond the Beam

A review of "Multidimensional Lasers" by Z. Horváth in Optics & Photonics News (July 2012) puts our work on chaotic microdisk lasers in the context of a history that's almost as old as laser physics itself but has only recently become a field in its own right: the study of beam shapes that deviate significantly from the pencil-like straight line geometry of conventional lasers.

Asymmetric resonant cavities in textbooks

References to our work appear in some standard texts on quantum chaos and semiclassical physics:
"Quantum Chaos — An Introduction" by H.-J. Stöckmann (Cambridge University Press 1999), and "Quantum Signatures of Chaos" by F. Haake (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2013).

The bowtie laser as a book cover

One of my microlaser simulations decorates the cover of this book by Alisa Bokulich, titled "Reexamining the Quantum-Classical Relation" (November 2008).

Another book appearance of our ARC images is the volume Microcavities by A Kavokin, J.J. Baumberg, G. Malpuech and F.P. Laussy, Oxford University Press, (February 25, 2008)

Physical Review Focus (3 September 2004) points to the whispering-gallery microlaser information collected on this website.

The cover of Physical Review Letters, July 18 2003, features our work on microspheres:

Directional tunnel escape from nearly spherical optical resonators

Scott Lacey, Hailin Wang, David H. Foster and Jens U. Nöckel
vol. 91, p. 033902.

The preprint is available here.

For the EXPO 2000 World Fair in Germany, I created a presentation that has been made part of a permanent exhibition maintained by the Max-Planck Society:
The Science Tunnel
(the exhibit is no longer online).

My thesis work helped Yale University recruit graduate students:
Our 1997 "Nature" cover headed this Yale web page Yale image

(no longer online).

One of the projects I started as a postdoc made it to the cover of the annual report of the MPI for Physics of Complex Systems, and also into the "Optics in 2000" section of OPN, see below.

Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories (now defunct) featured one of my plots on their "Physical Sciences" web page :

Click here

for more on leaky chaotic resonators

Examples of where our work has appeared:

Click here for background and details on our June 5, 1998 Science cover story

This is the cover of
Nature , 385, 1997;
and Picture of the Month in Bild der Wissenschaft, 4/1997.

This "Bowtie-Laser" is featured in cover stories in Physics World 9/98, Physikalische Blätter 10/98, and MPG-Spiegel 4/98.

Click here for a list of other newletters and media that have reported on this work.

In this "Optics in '97" special issue of Optics & Photonics News, our work appeared on the cover and in the "AfterImage" section. OPN selected our work as one of the year's highlights in '97 and in '98 and in 2000.

What is an Asymmetric Resonant Cavity anyway ?

The above image is the cover of my PhD thesis, and also appears in a recent online review article on scholarpedia by Martin Gutzwiller.

ARCs are convex resonators whose fractional deformation is so large that the wave equation cannot be solved satisfactorily by perturbation techniques. Shown here as an example is a dielectric cylinder with an oval cross section. Such resonators can be used in lasers or other devices that rely on the existence of long-lived states. The calculated intensity distribution of such a resonator mode is shown here as a false-color image (top of the picture). The key to understanding the intrinsic emission properties of these modes (e.g. their directional emission) is a one-to-one correspondence between waves and rays (red arrow, bottom). The wave field is affected by chaos in the ray dynamics.

Emission from the points of highest curvature is intuitively expected, and the tangential orientation follows from Snell's law of refraction.

Due to phase space structure, the light here originates slightly away from the high- curvature points, but still tangential to the surface.

Last modified: Fri Dec 18 09:56:34 PST 2020