Asymmetric Light Transmission in PT-Symmetric Microring Resonators

We propose a new type of add-drop microring resonator made of gain and loss materials. Microring resonators are compact, narrow band, and optical channel dropping filters. In such linear systems, light transmission to side-coupled signal waveguides is always symmetric. However, we prove that properly arranging a gain and loss modulation in the microring resonator provides a new functionality: asymmetric transmission; so that different resonant modes can be promoted depending on the input channel. This can be achieved when the resonator holds parity-time (PT-) symmetry, with periodic gain-loss and index modulations. PT-symmetry in optics generally requires that the index and gain-loss modulations are dephased by a quarter of the wavenumber of the modulation. Besides, we show that a simple half-gain half-loss microring also produces analogous results to a periodic PT-symmetric system. The results are numerically proved and also accounted by a simple analytical model. The effect of using complex modulated resonators with smaller periodicities is also analyzed.
The work of M. Botey, R. Herrero, and K. Staliunas was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia under Project FIS2011-29734-C02-01. The work of H. Kurt was supported in part by the Turkish Academy of Sciences.