Amplified and directional spontaneous emission from arbitrary composite bodies: self-consistent treatment of Purcell effect below threshold

Abstract

We study amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from wavelength-scale composite bodies--complicated arrangements of active and passive media--demonstrating highly directional and tunable radiation patterns, depending strongly on pump conditions, materials, and object shapes. For instance, we show that under large enough gain, $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetric dielectric spheres radiate mostly along either active or passive regions, depending on the gain distribution. Our predictions are based on a recently proposed fluctuating volume--current (FVC) formulation of electromagnetic radiation that can handle inhomogeneities in the dielectric and fluctuation statistics of active media, e.g. arising from the presence of non-uniform pump or material properties, which we exploit to demonstrate an approach to modelling ASE in regimes where Purcell effect (PE) has a significant impact on the gain, leading to spatial dispersion and/or changes in power requirements. The nonlinear feedback of PE on the active medium, captured by the Maxwell--Bloch equations but often ignored in linear formulations of ASE, is introduced into our linear framework by a self-consistent renormalization of the (dressed) gain parameters, requiring the solution of a large system of nonlinear equations involving many linear scattering calculations.