Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cao, Qi-Tao
• Liu, Ruishan
• Wang, Heming
• Lu, Yu-Kun
• Qiu, Cheng-Wei
• Rotter, Stefan
• Gong, Qihuang
• Xiao, Yun-Feng

Titel

Reconfigurable symmetry-broken laser in a symmetric microcavity

Ist Teil von

• Nature communications, 2020-02, Vol.11 (1), p.1136-1136, Article 1136

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The coherent light source is one of the most important foundations in both optical physics studies and applied photonic devices. However, the whispering gallery microcavity, as a prime platform for novel light sources, has the intrinsically chiral symmetry and severely rules out access to directional light output, all-optical flip-flops, efficient light extraction, etc. Here, we demonstrate a reconfigurable symmetry-broken microlaser in an ultrahigh-Q whispering gallery microcavity with the symmetric structure, in which a chirality of lasing field is empowered spontaneously by the optical nonlinear effect. Experimentally, the ratio of counter-propagating lasing intensities is found to exceed 160:1, and the chirality can be controlled dynamically and all-optically by the bias in the pump direction. This work not only presents a distinct recipe for coherent light sources with robust and reconfigurable performance, but also opens up an unexplored avenue to symmetry-broken physics in optical micro-structures.