Tao Lu, Xuan Du, Mohammad Amin Cheraghi Shirazi, Serge Vincent and Wenyan Yu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria
Ultrahigh-Q whispering-gallery microcavity (WGM) research is pertinent to a range of fields in photonics, ranging from optomechanics and cavity-enhanced quantum electrodynamics to narrow-linewidth laser nanosensors. To study the optical properties of WGM’s, accurate and highly efficient numerical techniques are needed. In this talk, we present two such techniques: A full-vectorial mode matching method and a beam propagation method, both of which are formulated in a cylindrical coordinate system suited for whispering-gallery mode circulation. We demonstrated that these techniques can compute optical properties, such as resonance wavelength and quality factor of a nonideal cavity deformed by plasmonic or nonplasmonic nanoparticle adsorption, with high accuracy and efficiency. Wave propagation behavior in microcavities of various sizes as well as their asymmetric variants can also be readily simulated with these techniques.