English

Extreme Sensitivity of Output Directionality to Boundary Perturbation in Wavelength-Scale Microcavities

Optics 2015-06-11 v1

Abstract

We report a surprising observation that the output directionality from wavelength-scale optical microcavities displays extreme sensitivity to deformations of the cavity shape. A variation of the cavity boundary on the order of ten thousandth of a wavelength may flip the output directions by 180 degrees. Our analysis based on a perturbation theory reveals that a tiny shape variation can cause a strong mixing of nearly degenerate cavity resonances with different angular momenta, and their interference determines the farfield emission pattern. This work shows the possibility of utilizing carefully-designed wavelength-scale microcavities for high-resolution detection and sensing applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1208.0792,
  title  = {Extreme Sensitivity of Output Directionality to Boundary Perturbation in Wavelength-Scale Microcavities},
  author = {Li Ge and Qinghai Song and Brandon Redding and Hui Cao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.0792},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures