Regulated Photon Transport in Chaotic Microcavities by Tailoring Phase Space

Manipulating light dynamics in optical microcavities has been made mainly either in real or momentum space. Here we report a phase-space tailoring scheme, simultaneously incorporating spatial and momentum dimensions, to enable deterministic and in situ regulation of photon transport in a chaotic microcavity. In the time domain, the chaotic photon transport to the leaky region can be suppressed, and the cavity resonant modes show stronger temporal confinement with quality factors being improved by more than 1 order of magnitude. In the spatial domain, the emission direction of the cavity field is controlled on demand through rerouting chaotic photons to a desired channel, which is verified experimentally by the far-field pattern of a quantum-dot microlaser. This work paves a way to in situ study of chaotic physics and promoting advanced applications such as arbitrary light routing, ultrafast random bit generation, and multifunctional on-chip lasers.