Amplified and directional spontaneous emission from arbitrary composite bodies: A self-consistent treatment of Purcell effect below threshold

Abstract

We study amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from wavelength-scale composite bodies - complicated arrangements of active and passive media - demonstrating highly directional and tunable radiation patterns, depending strongly on pump conditions, materials, and object shapes. For instance, we show that under large enough gain, PT symmetric dielectric spheres radiate mostly along either active or passive regions, depending on the gain distribution. Our predictions are based on a recently proposed fluctuating-volume-current formulation of electromagnetic radiation that can handle inhomogeneities in the dielectric and fluctuation statistics of active media, e.g., arising from the presence of nonuniform pump or material properties, which we exploit to demonstrate an approach to modeling ASE in regimes where Purcell effect (PE) has a significant impact on the gain, leading to spatial dispersion and/or changes in power requirements. The nonlinear feedback of PE on the active medium, captured by the Maxwell-Bloch equations but often ignored in linear formulations of ASE, is introduced into our linear framework by a self-consistent renormalization of the (dressed) gain parameters, requiring the solution of a large system of nonlinear equations involving many linear scattering calculations.