Acta Photonica Sinica, Volume. 53, Issue 5, 0553109(2024)
Surface Scattering Loss of a Spherical Microcavity
The ultra-high quality factor (typically above 107) of the whispering-gallery microresonators such as microsphere, microtoroid, microbubble is mainly due to the total-internal-reflection and ultra-smooth surface. Usually, higher quality factor corresponding to narrower linewidth and longer photon life-time, which strongly increase the light-matter interaction and sensing performance, makes those microresonators the perfect platform for the nonlinear optics and optical sensing research. To further optimize the quality factor, analysis and suppressing the main loss channels is needed. The loss in a whispering-gallery microresonator is mainly depends on absorption loss, scattering loss and radiation loss. Among them, the radiation loss of the resonator is more obvious for small cavity or lower refractive contrast, while the absorption loss and scattering loss from the bulk cavity material have less dependence with the cavity size. Since the fast development of fabrication techniques, the bulk absorption and scattering loss can be strongly suppressed, while the surface scattering loss trends to become dominant for large cavities. However, the previous estimations of surface scattering have a range covers several orders of magnitude, which also become unacceptable for meeting the requirement of further improvement.In this article, the surface scattering loss of a spherical microcavity with the tiny random surface roughness (far below the optical wavelength) is analyzed by applying the equivalent current method. The surface function of the microcavity is first transfer to the equivalent polarization current which excite the secondary modes. By combining the simplified total radiation power of the excited modes with the estimation of the surface field component, a more precise estimation of surface scattering loss is finally provided and further verified via numerical calculation.In detail, this equivalent current can be expressed as the superposition of two tangential fields and one radial field on surface of the microsphere. Among them, the transverse electric (TE) modes can only be excited by the tangential current, while the transvers magnetic (TM) modes can be excited by both the tangential and radial currents. Here, for simplicity, the equivalent current expansion for four TE modes is calculated because they only have the tangential part, and the scattering power can thus be calculated by adding together all the radiation power of the excited TE and TM radiation modes, and the total scattering power from the modes with same angular momentum is proportional to the angular momentum. Note that, for the TE radiation modes, the current expansion coefficient is proportional to the field overlapping of the original TE mode, and the scattering field is similar to the radiation field of the original TE mode.The total scattering cross-section of the random surface is similar to a collection of dipole scatterers
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Xiaochong YU, Chenglong DAI. Surface Scattering Loss of a Spherical Microcavity[J]. Acta Photonica Sinica, 2024, 53(5): 0553109
Category: Special Issue for Microcavity Photonics
Received: Feb. 29, 2024
Accepted: Apr. 23, 2024
Published Online: Jun. 20, 2024
The Author Email: YU Xiaochong (yuxc@bnu.edu.cn)