CPM Seminar

Confining light in an infinite cylinder

Pablo Bianucci

Department of Physics
Concordia University

Optical microresonators, device that can confine light come in many different forms. A very commonly used family of optical resonators are the whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonators, where light is confined in a dielectric material by total internal reflection. A particular member of this family, the surface nanoscale axial photonic resonator (SNAPR), combines the total internal reflection in the walls of a glass cylinder with axial confinement generated by nanoscale modifications. SNAPRs are particularly interesting because they allow for a quite clean separation between the axial and azimuthal behaviours.

Our research group can fabricate and characterize SNAPRs, and we have found several different optical phenomena, linear and nonlinear, in them. In this talk, I will introduce WGM resonators and SNAPRs, and will discuss our most recent results, including the generation of optical frequency combs, and the observation of optically excited transverse mechanical modes.