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.