Deformed glass microsphere as a three-dimensional chaotic optical microresonator

Summary form only given. Using theoretical approaches of ray and wave chaos, J.U. Nockel and A.D. Stone (1997) have recently proposed a new type of optical microresonators, such as deformed cylinders and spheres, that enable highly directional emission from high-Q whispering gallery modes (WGMs). These high-Q WGM microresonators can be used in a variety of optical applications such as microlasers, nonlinear optics, cavity QED, and optical switching and routing, and can also be used as a model system to investigate physical phenomena associated with ray and wave chaos. We report experimental studies of deformed glass microspheres fabricated using a novel approach that enables us to vary the eccentricity of a deformed sphere continuously. Using these deformed microspheres, we demonstrate for the first time directional emission and dynamical eclipsing from WGMs in a solid state microresonator. We also show that highly directional emission can occur at an eccentricity much smaller than current theoretical predictions based on 2D models. Theoretical calculations using ray tracing further indicate that the removal of rotational symmetry in a deformed microsphere can lead to qualitative differences in ray dynamics between 2D and 3D systems, providing a qualitative description for the experimental result.