Fresnel Filtering in Lasing Emission from Scarred Modes of Wave-Chaotic Optical Resonators

We study lasing emission from asymmetric resonant cavity GaN microlasers. By comparing far-field intensity patterns with images of the microlaser we find that the lasing modes are concentrated on three-bounce unstable periodic ray orbits; i.e., the modes are scarred. The high-intensity emission directions of these scarred modes are completely different from those predicted by applying Snell’s law to the ray orbit. This effect is due to the process of “Fresnel filtering” which occurs when a beam of finite angular spread is incident at the critical angle for total internal reflection.