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  • Letter

Local chirality at exceptional points in optical whispering-gallery microcavities

Junda Zhu1,2, Changqing Wang3, Can Tao4, Zhoutian Fu3, Haitao Liu4,*, Fang Bo1,†, Lan Yang3,‡, Guoquan Zhang1,§, and Jingjun Xu1,¶

  • 1The MOE Key Laboratory of Weak Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Institute of Applied Physics and School of Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300457, China
  • 2College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China
  • 3Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
  • 4Tianjin Key Laboratory of Micro-scale Optical Information Science and Technology, Institute of Modern Optics, College of Electronic Information and Optical Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China

  • *liuht@nankai.edu.cn
  • †bofang@nankai.edu.cn
  • ‡yang@seas.wustl.edu
  • §zhanggq@nankai.edu.cn
  • jjxu@nankai.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. A 108, L041501 – Published 12 October, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.108.L041501

Abstract

We study the field chirality at the exceptional points (EPs) in an optical whispering gallery mode (WGM) microcavity, which is commonly believed to be globally perfect. We have discovered a locally imperfect or locally perfect chirality of eigenmodes at the EPs in a WGM microcavity perturbed by two strong nanoscatterers. We find that the generally local and imperfect chirality at the EPs tends to be globally perfect with the decrease of the scattering effect induced by the nanoscatterers, and the chirality also becomes locally perfect with the decrease of the relative azimuthal angle between the two strong nanoscatterers. With a first-principles-based model considering a dynamic multiple-scattering process of the azimuthally propagating modes (APMs), all the above counterintuitive phenomena of imperfect or perfect chirality can be respectively explained by a strong or weak frequency dependence of the APM scattering coefficients at an effective scatterer composed of the two nanoscatterers. In this paper, we provide increased understanding of the general properties of chirality at EPs which will benefit potential applications enabled by the chirality features of non-Hermitian systems at EPs.

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Phys. Rev. A 108, L041501– Published 12 October, 2023
  • Received 21 June 2022
  • Revised 12 March 2023
  • Accepted 20 September 2023
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