Quantum chaos in optical microcavities

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan Wiersig
• Subject Area: Statistical Physics, Nonlinear Dynamics, Complex Systems, Soft and Fluid Matter, Biological Physics
• Term: from 2007 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 24367642

Present-day technology permits the fabrication of optical microcavities with a large variety of different materials, sizes, and geometries. Deformed microdisk cavities can be considered as open two-dimensional billiards. As such they are ideal systems to study complex wave scattering both theoretically and experimentally. The first part of this project aims at understanding the interplay of (partially) chaotic ray dynamics and the openness of this kind of systems. The second part deals with cavities made of metamaterials with negative index of refraction. Here, negative refraction changes the phase space structure considerably for cavities with non-convex boundary. In the third part we study dynamical tunneling in cavities with Kerr-type nonlinearity. Of particular interest is the nonlinear chaos-assisted tunneling from whispering-gallery modes localized near the boundary of the cavity.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 760: Scattering Systems with Complex Dynamics
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Martina Hentschel