Chaotic Cavity News

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 recent 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
(look for section 3 on complex systems).

My thesis work is helping Yale University recruit graduate students:
Our 1997 "Nature" cover heads this Yale web page.

The cover image (see blow) also appeared on Yale's printed graduate student brochure. Another of my plots, showing a mode of the "bowtie laser", is used in the header of the Yale Applied Physics web page.

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 are featuring 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: Wed Jul 23 10:11:24 PDT 2008