Why elliptic microcavity lasers emit light on bow-tie-like modes instead of whispering-gallery-like modes

Abstract

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. We study numerically a two-dimensional (2-D) elliptical microcavity laser, in the center of which a circular active region is located, modeling a focused pumped spot or an injection electrode. The object of the research is to study lasing spectra, gain-medium thresholds, and modal fields, found as solutions to a classical electromagnetic eigenvalue problem tailored to address the threshold conditions. The instrument of our study is the set of two coupled Muller boundary integral equations (BIE) on the boundaries of the cavity and the active region. These BIEs are discretized by the Nystrom technique that guarantees the convergence. Among the modes that co-exist in such a resonator, we demonstrate the whispering-gallery-like modes (WGM) and the bow-tie-like modes (BTM). We find that the threshold values of material gain of BTMs can become lower than those of nearby WGMs if the radius of the active region in the cavity center is getting sufficiently small.