抄録
Advances in fabrication technologies have allowed the fabrication of laser cavities with arbitrary 2-D
shapes. 2-D cavities have a wide variety of spatial modes, which have different wavefunctions. From
the viewpoints of both fundamental physics and practical applications, it is important to selectively
excite one desired mode from among many spatial modes. In this paper, we review the methods of
selective mode excitation for 2-D microcavity laser diodes based on the control of both cavity shape and
electrode contact pattern. We also review two major applications of the selective excitation technique to
fundamental research in both quantum and laser chaos. One is the observation of chaos-assisted
tunneling, and the other is compact chaotic laser devices that consist of a 2-D microcavity laser and an
external feedback cavity. Finally we refer to the potential applications of the selective excitation
technique to such functional optical devices as beam-switching devices and polarization-switching
devices.
