Controlling mode competition by tailoring the spatial pump distribution in a laser: a resonance-based approach.

We introduce a simplified version of the steady-state ab initio laser theory for calculating the effects of mode competition in continuous wave lasers using the passive cavity resonances. This new theory harnesses widely available numerical methods that can efficiently calculate the passive cavity resonances, with negligible additional computational overhead. Using this theory, we demonstrate that the pump profile of the laser cavity can be optimized both for highly multi-mode and single-mode emission. An open source implementation of this method has been made available.

Quantitative test of general theories of the intrinsic laser linewidth.

We perform a first-principles calculation of the quantum-limited laser linewidth, testing the predictions of recently developed theories of the laser linewidth based on fluctuations about the known steady-state laser solutions against traditional forms of the Schawlow-Townes linewidth. The numerical study is based on finite-difference time-domain simulations of the semiclassical Maxwell-Bloch lasing equations, augmented with Langevin force terms, and includes the effects of dispersion, losses due to the open boundary of the laser cavity, and non-linear coupling between the amplitude and phase fluctuations (α factor). We find quantitative agreement between the numerical results and the predictions of the noisy steady-state ab initio laser theory (N-SALT), both in the variation of the linewidth with output power, as well as the emergence of side-peaks due to relaxation oscillations.

Suppression of ground-state magnetization in finite-size systems due to off-diagonal interaction fluctuations

We study a generic model of interacting fermions in a finite-size disordered system. We show that the off-diagonal interaction matrix elements induce density of state fluctuations which generically favor a minimum spin ground state at large interaction amplitude, U. This effect competes with the exchange effect which favors large magnetization at large U, and it suppresses this exchange magnetization in a large parameter range. When off-diagonal fluctuations dominate, the model predicts a spin gap which is larger for odd-spin ground states as for even spin, suggesting a simple experimental signature of this off-diagonal effect in Coulomb blockade transport measurements.

Photovoltaic current response of mesoscopic conductors to quantized cavity modes.

We extend the analysis of the effects of electromagnetic (EM) fields on mesoscopic conductors to include the effects of field quantization, motivated by recent experiments on circuit QED. We show that in general there is a photovoltaic (PV) current induced by quantized cavity modes at zero bias across the conductor. This current depends on the average photon occupation number and vanishes identically when it is equal to the average number of thermal electron-hole pairs. We analyze in detail the case of a chaotic quantum dot at temperature Te in contact with a thermal EM field at temperature Tf, calculating the rms size of the PV current as a function of the temperature difference, finding an effect approximately pA.