Signature of Wave Chaos in Spectral Characteristics of Microcavity Lasers

Abstract

We report an experimental investigation on the spectra of fully chaotic and nonchaotic microcavity lasers under continuous-wave operating conditions. It is found that fully chaotic microcavity lasers operate in single mode, whereas nonchaotic microcavity lasers operate in multimode. The suppression of multimode lasing for fully chaotic microcavity lasers is explained by large spatial overlaps of the resonance wave functions that spread throughout the two-dimensional cavity due to the ergodicity of chaotic ray orbits.