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Published on: November 30, 2012
Coherent Perfect Absorption of Arbitrary Wavefronts at an Exceptional Point
Helmut Hörner1, Lena Wild1, Yevgeny Slobodkin2
1Institute for Theoretical Physics, <a href="https://ror.org/04d836q62">TU Wien</a>, Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10/136, A-1040 Vienna, Austria.
Abstract:
A coherent perfect absorber exploits the interferometric nature of light to deposit all of a light field's incident energy into an otherwise weakly absorbing sample. The downside of this concept is that the necessary destructive interference in coherent perfect absorbers gets easily destroyed both by spectrally or spatially detuning the incoming light field. Each of these two limitations has recently been overcome by insights from exceptional-point physics and by using a degenerate cavity, respectively. Here, we show how these two concepts can be combined into a new type of cavity design, which allows broadband exceptional-point absorption of arbitrary wavefronts. We present two possible implementations of such a massively degenerate exceptional-point absorber and compare analytical results with numerical simulations.
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