Light propagation in a Penrose unilluminable room.

Using the finite-difference time-domain method, propagation of light waves is studied in a Penrose unilluminable room. Such a room always has dark (unilluminated) regions, regardless of the position of a point source in it. However, in contrast to the predictions of ray dynamical simulations, a small amount of light propagates into the unilluminated regions via diffraction. We conjecture that this diffraction effect becomes more prominent as the size of the room decreases.

Lasing of TM modes in a two-dimensional GaAs microlaser.

We fabricated and tested an unstrained GaAs single-quantum-well microlaser which has a two-dimensional cavity shape known as the Penrose unilluminable room. The cavity exhibits quasi-one-dimensional modes, namely axial, diamond-shaped, and V-shaped modes. In contrast to previous observations of TE-polarized emission in GaAs microlasers, we observed TM-polarized emission. We explain this observation as being the result of lasing of the diamond-shaped modes whose incident angle at the cavity interface is very close to the Brewster angle.

Selective excitation of lowest-order transverse ring modes in a quasi-stadium laser diode.

For a two-dimensional quasi-stadium laser diode, we demonstrate stable excitation of the lowest-order transverse ring modes by optimally designing the confocal end mirrors of the laser cavity based on extended Fox-Li mode calculations. We observe kink-free light output versus injection current characteristics and highly directional single-peak emissions corresponding to the diamond-shaped trajectory in the cavity. These results provide convincing evidence for selective excitation of the lowest-order transverse modes.

Lowest-order axial and ring mode lasing in confocal quasi-stadium laser diodes.

We investigated the lasing modes of quasi-stadium laser diodes that have confocal cavity geometries, with stripe electrode contacts formed either along the cavity axis or a diamond-shaped trajectory. It was clearly demonstrated that by using narrow electrode contact patterns of 2 µm width, the lowest-order axial and ring modes were excited selectively. On the other hand, the second-lowest-order axial and ring modes were excited by using broad electrode patterns of 14 µm width. Experimentally obtained far-field patterns for lasers with broad and narrow electrode contact patterns agree very well with the simulation results obtained using an extended Fox-Li mode calculation method.

Experimental prediction of the wavelength-dependent path-length factor for optical intrinsic signal analysis.

Analysis of the optical intrinsic signal of an exposed cortex has been applied to measurement of functional brain activation. It is important for accurate measurement of concentration changes in oxygenated hemoglobin and deoxygenated hemoglobin to consider the wavelength dependence of the mean optical path lengths for the reflectance of cortical tissue. A method is proposed to experimentally estimate the wavelength dependence of the mean optical path length in cortical tissue from the multispectral reflectance of the exposed cortex without any additional instruments. The trend in the wavelength dependence of the mean optical path length estimated by the proposed method agrees with that estimated by the model-based prediction, whereas the magnitude of the wavelength dependence predicted by the proposed method is greater than that of the model-based prediction. The experimentally predicted mean optical path length minimizes the difference in the measured changes in the concentrations of the oxygenated hemoglobin and deoxygenated hemoglobin calculated from different wavelength pairs.