Room Temperature Persistent Spectral Hole Burning in Distributions of Optical Cavities: A Simple Fabry-Perot Model,
Abstract
Efforts to create materials in which to burn holes at higher temperatures face an inherent contradiction: the need for inhomogeneous line broadening from host-guest interactions, vs. the desire to limit the homogeneous line broadening from thermal fluctuations of host-guest interactions (i.e. phonon broadening). A different approach to the question of how to bum holes at high temperatures was recently conceived and experimentally confirmed. This approach relies on using distributions of chromophore-doped optical cavities as the hole burning medium. The effect was recently observed in dye-doped micro-spheres. As a simple model illustrating the important effects characteristic to these Mie theory cavity resonances in spheres, the Fabry-Perot is treated analytically and numerically in this work. The dynamic consequences of confining emitting species in cavities has been an active topic of research in recent years. Spectroscopic aspects of doped cavities have received less attention, however. Placing optically active molecules within cavities imposes periodically varying structure on the molecular spectrum. The spectrum of dye molecules in a single cavity will contain sharp lines at wavelengths satisfying the cavity round trip equation, with widths that reflect the confinement time of the light inside the cavity. This may be thought of as the homogeneous linewidth imposed by the cavity. Arnold and coworkers demonstrated that a distribution of cavity sizes (the radii of microspheres in Ref. 1) imposes an inhomogeneous spectral distribution, and that this can be taken advantage of to bum spectral holes at room temperature. Interest in this phenomena is sparked by its nature as a new type of hole burning effect, its possible utility for frequency domain optical memory, and its use to size and study the motion of distributions of micros heres.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 22, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADP008263
Entities
People
- Dee W. Pack