Extreme output sensitivity to subwavelength boundary deformation in microcavities

Li Ge, Qinghai Song, Brandon Redding, and Hui Cao

Phys. Rev. A 87, 023833 – Published 22 February 2013

Abstract

We demonstrate a generic and robust mechanism that leads to an extreme output sensitivity to a deep subwavelength boundary perturbation in wavelength-scale microcavities. A deformation of the cavity boundary on the order of ten-thousandth of a wavelength may flip the output directions by $180^{\circ}$ , corresponding to a variation of 0.1 nm for a 1- $μ m$ -radius cavity. Our analysis based on a perturbation theory reveals that such tiny structural change can cause a strong mixing of nearly degenerate cavity resonances with different angular momenta, and their interference is greatly enhanced to have a radical influence on the far-field pattern. Our finding opens the possibility of utilizing carefully designed wavelength-scale microcavities for fast beam steering and high-resolution detection.

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Received 25 July 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.87.023833

Authors & Affiliations

Li Ge^1,*, Qinghai Song², Brandon Redding³, and Hui Cao^3,†

¹Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
²Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055 China
³Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8482, USA

^*lge@princeton.edu
^†hui.cao@yale.edu

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Vol. 87, Iss. 2 — February 2013

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