Coherent Perfect Light for Organic Microdevices

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Karl Leo
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442597684

The goal of this project is to explore fundamental ideas and approaches known as the concept of coherent perfect light. We wish to develop concepts for novel organic photonic microdevices whose optical properties could be tuned in a wide range using coherence as a degree of freedom. We aim to precisely control the optical processes to optimize device performance by adjusting amplitudes, relative phases, and polarization of all incoming light waves in a coherent manner. Potential applications include coherent perfect light absorption and transmission, coherent perfect light incoupling into the optical waveguides or integrated planar circuits, various kinds of critically-coupled organic thin-film devices, etc.Coherent control of all these phenomena is only possible with complex photonic structures which are designed and produced on purpose to support the desired eigenfunctions. Therefore, an essential aspect of reaching the goal is the possibility to develop and precisely control the device structures. Most of the proposed approaches in this project require loosening of resonant conditions (e.g., coherent perfect light incouplers) or dichroic operation at two wavelengths (critically-coupled organic lasers), which involves extensive use of aperiodic photonic structures. Since these are difficult to design and optimize, along the standard computational techniques, such as transfer or scattering matrices or FDTD approach, numerical stochastic and probabilistic methods will be used. We will also introduce optically anisotropic cavities to understand the physics of exceptional points in k-space. Here, the polarization of the light becomes an essential and critical parameter, which allows precise control of the absorption in the cavity because of the chiral dynamics of the propagating light caused by the optical anisotropy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants