Universality and beyond in Optical Microcavity Billiards with Source-Induced Dynamics

Abstract

Optical microcavity billiards are a paradigm of a mesoscopic model system for quantum chaos. We demonstrate the action and origin of ray-wave correspondence in real and phase space using far-field emission characteristics and Husimi functions. Whereas universality induced by the invariant-measure dominated far-field emission is known to be a feature shaping the properties of many lasing optical microcavities, the situation changes in the presence of sources that we discuss here. We investigate the source-induced dynamics and the resulting limits of universality while we find ray-picture results to remain a useful tool in order to understand the wave behaviour of optical microcavities with sources. We demonstrate the source-induced dynamics in phase space from the source ignition until a stationary regime is reached comparing results from ray, ray-with-phase, and wave simulations and explore ray–wave correspondence.

Keywords

• microcavity billiards
• sources
• ray–wave correspondence
• phase-space dynamics
• Husimi function
• quantum chaos