Recent discovery of the coherent lasing from various disordered materials adds a new dimension to the conventional physics of light propagation in multiply scattering media. It suggests that in the situation, when the propagation of light is diffusive on average, the coherent feedback can be provided by the sparse disorder configurations that efficiently trap a photon, and thus, serve as random resonators. This scenario of random resonators has been
substantiated experimentally by the ensemble averaging of the power Fourier transforms of the random emission spectra. In this paper the current status of the experiment and theory of coherent random lasing is reviewed.
Photonic crystals (PC) are a class of artificial structures with a periodic dielectric function. PCs can be a laboratory for testing fundamental processes involving interactions of radiation with matter in novel conditions. We have studied the optical properties of opal PCs that are infiltrated with highly polarizable media such as j-aggregates of cyanine dyes. Opals are self-assembled structures of silica spheres. We report our studies on clarifying the relationship between a polaritonic gap and a photonic stop band (Bragg gap) when they resonantly coexist in the same structure. Infiltration of opal with polarizable molecules combines the polaritonic and Bragg diffractive effects. Both effects exist independently when the Bragg (at ω = ωB) and polaritonic (ω = ωT) resonances are well separated in frequency. A completely different situation occurs when ωT ≈ωB. Such a condition was achieved in opals that were infiltrated with J-aggregates of cyanine dyes that have large Rabi frequency. Our measurements show some dramatic changes in the shape of the reflectivity plateaus, which are due to the interplay between the photonic band gap and the polaritonic gap. The experimental results on reflectivity and its dependence on the light propagation angle and concentration of the cyanie dyes are in agreement with the theoretical calculations.
We discuss the role of many-body spin correlations in nonlinear optical response of a Fermi sea system with a deep impurity level. Due to the Hubbard repulsion between electrons at the impurity, the optical transitions between the impurity level and the Fermi sea states lead to an optically-induced Kondo effect. In particular, the third- order nonlinear optical susceptibility logarithmically diverges at the absorption threshold. The shape of the pump- probe spectrum is governed by the light-induced Kondo temperature, which can be tuned by varying the intensity and frequency of the pump optical field. In the Kondo limit, corresponding to off-resonant pump excitation, the nonlinear absorption spectrum exhibits a narrow peak below the linear absorption onset.
The effect of disorder on the collective emission from a system of classical oscillators is studied theoretically. Three types of disorder are considered: random orientation of dipole moments, finite spread in frequencies of the individual oscillators (diagonal disorder), and dipole- dipole interaction (off-diagonal disorder). We found that for sufficiently high concentration of oscillators the diagonal disorder does not completely destroy the collective character of the emission. We show that the eigenmodes of a cooperative system with disorder comprise a large number of oscillators and, due to cooperative character of the emission, their lifetime is much longer than the lifetime of an individual oscillator. Consequently, the cooperative emission spectrum of the system is not simply broadened by the disorder, but represents a superposition of relatively narrow peaks.
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