Resonance--Assisted Tunneling in Deformed Optical Microdisks with a Mixed Phase Space

The life times of optical modes in whispering-gallery cavities crucially depend on the underlying classical ray dynamics and may be spoiled by the presence of classical nonlinear resonances due to resonance--assisted tunneling. Here we present an intuitive semiclassical picture which allows for an accurate prediction of decay rates of optical modes in systems with a mixed phase space. We also extend the perturbative description from near-integrable systems to systems with a mixed phase space and find equally good agreement. Both approaches are based on the approximation of the actual ray dynamics by an integrable Hamiltonian, which enables us to perform a semiclassical quantization of the system and to introduce a ray-based description of the decay of optical modes. The coupling between them is determined either perturbatively or semiclassically in terms of complex paths.