Abstract
We report the surprising observation of directional tunneling escape from nearly spherical fused-silica optical resonators, in which most of the phase space is filled with nonchaotic regular trajectories. Experimental and theoretical studies of the dependence of the far-field emission pattern on both the degree of deformation and the excitation condition show that nonperturbative phase-space structures in the internal ray dynamics profoundly affect tunneling leakage of the whispering-gallery modes.
- Received 20 September 2002
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.033902
©2003 American Physical Society