Mathematical and numerical modeling of a drop-shaped microcavity laser

This paper studies electromagnetic fields, frequencies of lasing, and emission thresholds of a drop-shaped microcavity laser. From the mathematical point of view, the original problem is a nonstandard two-parametric eigenvalue problem for the Helmholtz equation on the whole plane. The desired positive parameters are the lasing frequency and the threshold gain, the corresponding eigenfunctions are the amplitudes of the lasing modes. This problem is usually referred to as the lasing eigenvalue problem. In this study, spectral characteristics are calculated numerically, by solving the lasing eigenvalue problem on the basis of the set of Muller boundary integral equations, which is approximated by the Nyström method. The Muller equations have weakly singular kernels, hence the corresponding operator is Fredholm with zero index. The Nyström method is a special modification of the polynomial quadrature method for boundary integral equations with weakly singular kernels. This algorithm is accurate for functions that are well approximated by trigonometric polynomials, for example, for eigenmodes of resonators with smooth boundaries. This approach leads to a characteristic equation for mode frequencies and lasing thresholds. It is a nonlinear algebraic eigenvalue problem, which is solved numerically by the residual inverse iteration method. In this paper, this technique is extended to the numerical modeling of microcavity lasers having a more complicated form. In contrast to the microcavity lasers with smooth contours, which were previously investigated by the Nyström method, the drop has a corner. We propose a special modification of the Nyström method for contours with corners, which takes also the symmetry of the resonator into account. The results of numerical experiments presented in the paper demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.