Far-from-Equilibrium Route to Superthermal Light in Bimodal Nanolasers

Mathias Marconi,Alejandro M Yacomotti,Julien Javaloyes,Fabrice Raineri,Philippe Hamel,Ariel Levenson

doi:10.1103/physrevx.8.011013

Abstract

Micro- and nanoscale lasers that display superthermal intensity fluctuations could lead to novel applications in quantum information processing and imaging techniques. Experiments demonstrate a new method for generating superthermal light using a bimodal semiconductor nanolaser.

Highlights

The ability to tailor specific correlation properties of light is of central importance in quantum optics and of practical interest in applications such as the generation of multiphoton effects [1] and time-domain ghost imaging [2]
The analogy between falling Brownian particles and compound cavity laser systems relies on three important features: (i) coupled cavities may support several eigenmodes which, as long as the cavities are filled with active media, interact through mode-mode scattering and/or gain competition leading to energy flow among the modes [32,34]; (ii) stochastic fluctuations are intrinsic because of spontaneous emission noise; and (iii) the equilibrium below laser threshold is thermal
The signatures of nonequilibrium transients are heavy-tailed photon distributions of the weak hybrid mode, which have been experimentally observed by means of a single-pulse energy detection scheme

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The ability to tailor specific correlation properties of light is of central importance in quantum optics and of practical interest in applications such as the generation of multiphoton effects [1] and time-domain ghost imaging [2]. Superthermal fluctuations have been reported in the spatial domain as a result of light propagation in disordered waveguide arrays [8,9] In all these cases, (quantum or classical) light and/or matter coupling mechanisms at (quasi)equilibrium are the main ingredients to generate extra correlations. Our quenched bimodal nanolaser belongs to a large class of far-from-equilibrium systems where superthermal statistics is the consequence of transient transport mechanisms in phase space dominating over noise diffusion. It shows the experimental results on long-tailed superthermal light, which are subsequently discussed and compared with the theoretical predictions.

CLASSICAL OPTICAL QUENCH THEORY

EXPERIMENTAL REALIZATION

ANALOGY WITH BROWNIAN PARTICLES

CONCLUSIONS