Coherent thermal source formed by periodic microcavities

An extraordinary coherent thermal emission from an anisotropic microstructure is experimentally and theoretically presented. The enhanced coherency is due to coherent coupling between resonant cavities obtained by surface standing waves, where each cavity supports a localized field that is attributed to coupled surface phonon-polaritons. We show that it is possible to obtain a polarized quasi-monochromatic thermal source from a SiC microstructure with a high quality factor Q ~ 600 at the resonant frequency of the cavity, and a spatial coherence length 760λ which corresponds to angular divergence of 1.3mrad.

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