Loss-induced suppression and revival of lasing

Understand

Controlling and reversing the effects of loss are major challenges in optical systems.

• For lasers losses need to be overcome by a sufficient amount of gain to reach the lasing threshold.
• We show how to turn losses into gain by steering the parameters of a system to the vicinity of an exceptional point (EP), which occurs when the eigenvalues and the corresponding eigenstates of a system coalesce.
• In our system of coupled microresonators, EPs are manifested as the loss-induced suppression and revival of lasing.