Coherent perfect absorbers: Time-reversed lasers

By Y. Chong, L. Ge, Hui Cao, A. Douglas Stone. CLEO/QELS: 2010 Laser Science to Photonic Applications, 2010

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An arbitrary body or aggregate can be made perfectly absorbing at discrete frequencies, if a precise amount of dissipation is added under specific conditions of coherent monochromatic illumination. This effect arises from the interaction of optical absorption and wave interference, and corresponds to moving a zero of the S-matrix onto the real wavevector axis. It is thus the time-reversed process of lasing at threshold. The effect may be demonstrated in a Si slab illuminated in the 500–900nm range. Coherent perfect absorbers form a novel class of linear optical elements—absorptive interferometers—which may be useful for controlled optical energy transfer.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b9ee20e6c777cb36baf1ea98c229857ff655af7

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Light fields in complex media: Mesoscopic scattering meets wave control (2017, background): “An experimental demonstration that also still remains to be done is that of a multi-channel coherent perfect absorber (Chong et al., 2010), which could go as far as to demonstrate the time-reverse process of random lasing.”