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A photonic thermalization gap in disordered lattices

Nature Physics volume 11, pages 930–935 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

The formation of gaps—forbidden ranges in the values of a physical parameter—is common to a variety of physical systems: from energy bandgaps of electrons in periodic lattices1 and their analogues in photonic2, phononic3 and plasmonic4 systems to pseudo-energy gaps in aperiodic quasicrystals5. Here, we predict a thermalization gap for light propagating in finite disordered structures characterized by disorder-immune chiral symmetry6—the appearance of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors in skew-symmetric pairs. In these systems, the span of sub-thermal photon statistics is inaccessible to input coherent light, which—once the steady state is reached—always emerges with super-thermal statistics no matter how small the disorder level. We formulate an independent constraint of the input field for the chiral symmetry to be activated and the gap to be observed. This unique feature enables a new form of photon-statistics interferometry: the deterministic tuning of photon statistics via controlled excitation symmetry breaking realized by sculpting the amplitude or phase of the input coherent field.

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Figure 1: One-dimensional lattices with diagonal and off-diagonal disorder.
Figure 2: Emergence of a thermalization gap in disordered lattices.
Figure 3: Asymptotic normalized intensity correlation as a function of lattice size.
Figure 4: Chiral-symmetry-breaking for deterministic control over photon statistics in a disordered optical lattice.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Advanced Research Computing Center at the University of Central Florida for access to the high-performance computing cluster. We thank D. N. Christodoulides and A. Keles for helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CREOL, The College of Optics & Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida 32816, USA

    H. Esat Kondakci, Ayman F. Abouraddy & Bahaa E. A. Saleh

Authors
  1. H. Esat Kondakci
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  2. Ayman F. Abouraddy
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  3. Bahaa E. A. Saleh
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Contributions

H.E.K., A.F.A. and B.E.A.S. conceived the concept. H.E.K. carried out all the simulations and analysis. All authors contributed to writing the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ayman F. Abouraddy or Bahaa E. A. Saleh.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Kondakci, H., Abouraddy, A. & Saleh, B. A photonic thermalization gap in disordered lattices. Nature Phys 11, 930–935 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3482

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