Optical Micro-Resonators are an exciting new field of research that has gained prominence in the past few years due to the emergence of new fabrication technologies. This book is the first detailed text on the theory, fabrication, and applications of optical micro-resonators, and will be found useful by both graduate students and researchers in the field.

Assembling an international team of experts, this book reports on the progress in the rapidly growing field of monolithic micro- and nanoresonators. The book opens with a chapter on photonic crystal-based resonators (nanocavities). It goes on to describe resonators in which the closed trajectories of light are supported by any variety of total internal reflection in curved and polygonal transparent dielectric structures. The book also covers distributed feedback microresonators for slow light, controllable dispersion, and enhanced nonlinearity. A portion of coverage is dedicated to the unique properties of resonators, which are extremely efficient tools when conducting multiple applications.

Confinement and manipulation of photons using microcavities have triggered intense research interest in both basic and applied physics for more than a decade. Prominent examples are whispering gallery microcavities which confine photons by means of continuous total internal reflection along a curved and smooth surface. The long photon lifetime, strong field confinement, and in-plane emission characteristics make them promising candidates for enhancing light-matter interactions on a chip. In this book, we will introduce different ultra-high-Q whispering gallery microcavities, and focus on their applications in enhancing light-matter interaction, such as ultralow-threshold microlasing, highly sensitive optical biosensing, nonlinear optics, cavity quantum electrodynamics and cavity optomechanics.

By recirculating light in a nonlinear propagation medium, the nonlinear optical cavity allows for countless options of light transformation and manipulation. In passive media, optical bistability and frequency conversion are central figures. In active media, laser light can be generated with versatile underlying dynamics. Emphasizing on ultrafast dynamics, the vital arena for the information technology, the soliton is a common conceptual keyword, thriving into its modern developments with the closely related denominations of dissipative solitons and cavity solitons. Recent technological breakthroughs in optical cavities, from micro-resonators to ultra-long fiber cavities, have entitled the exploration of nonlinear optical dynamics over unprecedented spatial and temporal orders of magnitude. By gathering key contributions by renowned experts, this book aims at bridging the gap between recent research topics with a view to foster cross-fertilization between research areas and stimulating creative optical engineering design.

Optical microresonators have generated much progress in many aspects of optical science, such as in optical buffering, wavelength division-multiplexed filters for optical networks, optical switching, and in the enhancement of nonlinear effects. All these applications are made possible by the confinement of light within a small modal volume in the microresonator. The ability to actively tune the resonance within a microresonator has resulted in systems that can dynamically manipulate the flow of light. This thesis discusses some of the novel capabilities of these dynamic systems. Chapters 3 - 4 discusses the use of a dynamic delay line to suppress dispersion, and to overcome the gain-bandwidth product constraint of slow-light structures. This is followed by Chapter 5 which introduces a light-stopping scheme based on loss modulation. Finally, Chapter 6 shows how coherent control can be used in a microresonator system to enhance optical switching.

The technology surrounding the design and fabrication of optical microresonators has matured to a point where there is a need for commercialization. Consequently, there is a need for device research involving more advanced architectures and more esoteric operating principles. Photonic Microresonator Research and Applications explores advances in the fabrication process that enable nanometer waveguide separations, exceptionally smooth surfaces essential to reach Q factors in the order of 106- 108 and high index contrast materials.

This book introduces the basic concept of a dissipative soliton, before going to explore recent theoretical and experimental results for various classes of dissipative optical solitons, high-energy dissipative solitons and their applications, and mode-locked fiber lasers. A soliton is a concept which describes various physical phenomena ranging from solitary waves forming on water to ultrashort optical pulses propagating in an optical fiber. While solitons are usually attributed to integrability, in recent years the notion of a soliton has been extended to various systems which are not necessarily integrable. Until now, the main emphasis has been given to well-known conservative soliton systems, but new avenues of inquiry were opened when physicists realized that solitary waves did indeed exist in a wide range of non-integrable and non-conservative systems leading to the concept of so-called dissipative optical solitons. Dissipative optical solitons have many unique properties which differ from those of their conservative counterparts. For example, except for very few cases, they form zero-parameter families and their properties are completely determined by the external parameters of the optical system. They can exist indefinitely in time, as long as these parameters stay constant. These features of dissipative solitons are highly desirable for several applications, such as in-line regeneration of optical data streams and generation of stable trains of laser pulses by mode-locked cavities.

This ebook is a collection of cutting edge articles from the 2009 Workshop on Microcavities and their Applications (WOMA 2009). It gives readers an overview of state-of-the-art opto electronic research on nano and micro cavities presented by leading exper