Theory of the coherence of topological lasers

Abstract: We present a theoretical study of the temporal and spatial coherence properties of a topological laser device built by including saturable gain on the edge sites of a Harper--Hofstadter lattice for photons. For small enough lattices the Bogoliubov analysis applies, the emission is nearly a single-mode one and the coherence time is almost determined by the total number of photons in the device in agereement with the standard Schawlow-Townes phase diffusion. In larger lattices, looking at the lasing edge mode in the comoving frame of its chiral motion, the spatio-temporal correlations of long-wavelength fluctuations display a Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scaling. Still, at very long times, when the finite size of the device starts to matter, the functional form of the temporal decay of coherence changes from the KPZ stretched exponential to a Schawlow-Townes-like exponential, while the nonlinear many-mode dynamics of KPZ fluctuations remains visible as an enhanced linewidth as compared to the single-mode Schawlow-Townes prediction. While we have established the above behaviors also for non-topological laser arrays, the crucial role of topology in protecting the coherence from static disorder is finally highlighted: our ground-breaking numerical calculations suggest the dramatically reinforced coherence properties of topological lasers compared to corresponding non-topological devices. These results open exciting possibilities for both fundamental studies of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and concrete applications to laser devices.