Ray and wave chaos in asymmetric resonant optical cavities

Optical resonators are essential components of lasers and other wavelength-sensitive optical devices. A resonator is characterized by a set of modes, each with a resonant frequency omega and resonance width Delta omega=1/tau, where tau is the lifetime of a photon in the mode. In a cylindrical or spherical dielectric resonator, extremely long-lived resonances are due to whispering gallery' modes in which light circulates around the perimeter trapped by total internal reflection. These resonators emit light isotropically. Recently, a new category of asymmetric resonant cavities (ARCs) has been proposed in which substantial shape deformation leads to partially chaotic ray dynamics. This has been predicted to give rise to a universal, frequency-independent broadening of the whispering-gallery resonances, and highly anisotropic emission. Here we present solutions of the wave equation for ARCs which confirm many aspects of the earlier ray-optics model, but also reveal interesting frequency-dependent effects characteristic of quantum chaos. For small deformations the lifetime is controlled by evanescent leakage, the optical analogue of quantum tunneling. We find that the lifetime is much shortened by a process known as chaos-assisted tunneling’. In contrast, for large deformations (~10%) some resonances are found to have longer lifetimes than predicted by the ray chaos model due to `dynamical localization’.