Satoshi Sunada: Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Science and Engineering, Kanazawa University, Kakuma-machi Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920-1192, Japan.
Takehiro Fukushima: Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Okayama Prefectural University, 111 Kuboki Soja, Okayama 719-1197, Japan.
Takahisa Harayama: Department of Applied Physics, School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Waseda University, 3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan.
We report an experimental investigation on the spectra of fully chaotic and nonchaotic microcavity lasers under continuous-wave operating conditions. It is found that fully chaotic microcavity lasers operate in single mode, whereas nonchaotic microcavity lasers operate in multimode. The suppression of multimode lasing for fully chaotic microcavity lasers is explained by large spatial overlaps of the resonance wave functions that spread throughout the two-dimensional cavity due to the ergodicity of chaotic ray orbits.
