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Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers have considerable promise as high sensitivity magnetometers, however are commonly limited by inefficient collection and low contrasts. Laser threshold magnetometry (LTM) enables efficient collection and high contrasts, providing a path towards higher sensitivity magnetometry. We demonstrate an infrared LTM using an ensemble of NV centers in a single crystal diamond plate integrated into a vertical external cavity surface emitting laser. The laser was tuned to the spin dependent absorption line of the NV centers, allowing for optical readout by monitoring the laser output power. We demonstrate a magnetic sensitivity of 7.5~nT/$\sqrt{\textit{Hz}}$ in the frequency range between 10 and 50 Hz. Furthermore, the contrast and the projected PSNL sensitivity are shown to improve significantly by operating close to the lasing threshold, achieving 18.4\% and 26.6~pT/$\sqrt{\textit{Hz}}$ near threshold. What's more, an unexpected saturable absorption phenomenon was observed near threshold, which enhanced the contrast and projected PSNL sensitivity.

We introduce a glide symmetric optical waveguide exhibiting a stationary inflection point (SIP) in the Bloch wavenumber dispersion relation. An SIP is a third order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) where three Bloch eigenmodes coalesce to form a so-called frozen mode with vanishing group velocity and diverging amplitude. We show that the incorporation of chirped distributed Bragg reflectors and distributed coupling between waveguides in the periodic structure facilitates the SIP formation and greatly enhances the characteristics of the frozen mode regime. We confirm the existence of an SIP in two ways: by observing the flatness of the dispersion diagram and also by using a coalescence parameter describing the separation of the three eigenvectors collapsing on each other. We find that in the absence of losses, both the quality factor and the group delay at the SIP grow with the cubic power of the cavity length. The frozen mode regime can be very attractive for light amplification and lasing, in optical delay lines, sensors, and modulators., Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures

The concept of lasers based on the frozen mode regime in active periodic optical waveguides with a 3rd-order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) is advanced. The frozen mode regime in a lossless and gainless waveguide is associated with a stationary inflection point (SIP) in the Bloch dispersion relation, where three Bloch eigenmodes coalesce forming the frozen mode. As a practical example, we consider an asymmetric serpentine optical waveguide (ASOW). An ASOW operating near the SIP frequency displays a large group delay of a non-resonant nature that scales as the cube of the waveguide length, leading to a strong gain enhancement when active material is included. Therefore, a laser operating in the close vicinity of an SIP has a gain threshold that scales as a negative cube of the waveguide length. We determine that this scaling law is maintained in the presence of small distributed losses, such as radiation associated with waveguide bends and roughness. In addition, we show that although gain causes a distortion in the modes coalescing at the SIP, the properties of the frozen mode are relatively resistant to such small perturbations and we still observe a large degree of exceptional degeneracy for gain values that bring the system above threshold. Finally, our study also reveals that lasing near an SIP is favored over lasing near a photonic band edge located in close proximity to the SIP. In particular, we observe that an SIP-induced lasing in an ASOW displays lower gain threshold compared to lasing near the photonic regular band edge (RBE), even though the SIP resonance has a lower quality factor than the RBE resonance.

We design a three-way silicon optical waveguide with the Bloch dispersion relation supporting a stationary inflection point (SIP). The SIP is a third order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) where three Bloch modes coalesce forming the frozen mode with greatly enhanced amplitude. The proposed design consists of a coupled resonators optical waveguide (CROW) coupled to a parallel straight waveguide. At any given frequency, this structure supports three pairs of reciprocal Bloch eigenmodes, propagating and/or evanescent. In addition to full-wave simulations, we also employ a so-called ''hybrid model'' that uses transfer matrices obtained from full-wave simulations of sub-blocks of the unit cell. This allows us to account for radiation losses and enables a design procedure based on minimizing the eigenmodes' coalescence parameter. The proposed finite-length CROW displays almost unitary transfer function at the SIP frequency, implying a nearly perfect conversion of the input light into the frozen mode. The group delay and the effective quality factor at the SIP frequency show an $N^{3}$ scaling, where $N$ is the number of unit cells in the cavity. The frozen mode in the CROW can be utilized in various applications like sensors, lasers and optical delay lines., Comment: 14 pages, 17 figures

We show that by using a perturbed photonic Dirac-cone, one can realize ultra-narrow and finite Q-factor peak in the wavevector space, with both the peak value and the width separately tunable. We also discuss a lower bound in the minimal viable width given a peak Q-value while maintaining sufficient Q differentiation among modes. The strong angular and frequency Q-selection finds applications in optical devices where strong angle- and frequency-selection is needed., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

A single transverse mode high pulse-energy VECSEL was developed. The GaSb based VECSEL emits at a wavelength of 2.04 microns with a peak power exceeding 500W while maintaining good beam quality. The cavity employs a Pockels cell combined with a low-loss thin film polarizer to selectively dump the intracavity energy into a 10ns pulse. The laser has promise for incoherent LiDAR, materials processing, gas sensing, and nonlinear optics., Comment: 10 PAGES, 5 FIGURES