2020 Research as Art winner - Jens Noeckel & Kahli Burke

One of six winners of the 2020 ArtSci Oregon competition (https://www.artscioregon.com/2020-gallery) is this image, based on work by Kahli Burke and Jens Noeckel, published in the journal Physical Review A (https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.063829). It illustrates how the coexistence of order and chaos manifests itself in wave patterns representing light trapped in a quasibound state of a planar dielectric resonator designed to be attached to waveguides. Waveguide coupling is known to be incompatible with the formation of whispering-gallery modes, one of the most efficient ways of confining light in small spaces. The image shows the "next best thing:" a folded chaotic whisperin- gallery mode which is surprisingly resilient to the perturbations introduced by the wire attachments. The phenomenon is surprising because in the classical ray picture no such long-lived, whispering-gallery patterns exist. The reason is that instead of circulating around the perimeter of the cavity (characteristic of the whispering-galery phenomenon), rays invariably get thrown off course by the portions of the boundary that open into a waveguide. Wave patterns in such "quantum chaotic" systems are often visually striking, and in the present case this is amplified by the fact that the system is open to the environment, allowing the wave to access the space surrounding the cavity and wave guide, too. 

More information can be found on this page: https://pages.uoregon.edu/noeckel/foldedWGM/