Matthias Liertzer

TL;DR: Overturning conventional wisdom that loss is bad and should be minimized, Peng et al. show that carefully tweaking the coupling strength between the various components of a coupled optical system can actually result in an enhancement of the optical properties by adding more loss into the system.

TL;DR: It is shown that exceptional points can be conveniently induced in a photonic molecule laser by a suitable variation of the applied pump, including a strongly decreasing intensity of the emitted laser light for increasing pump power.

TL;DR: It is shown how to impose a strong chirality and a switchable direction of light propagation in an optical system by steering it to an exceptional point (EP)—a degeneracy universally occurring in all open physical systems when two eigenvalues and the corresponding eigenstates coalesce.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the above-threshold behavior of a laser can be strongly affected by exceptional points which are induced by pumping the laser nonuniformly.

TL;DR: Going beyond the regime of strongly scattering media where localized modes with a given directionality can simply be selected by the pump, this work presents an optimization-based approach which shapes extended lasing modes in the weakly scattering regime according to any predetermined emission pattern.