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We will discuss two kinds of exceptional points of degeneracy in waveguides and their respective application in lasers. Such exceptional points occur in waveguides with balanced loss and gain (e.g., PT symmetry), and in waveguides without loss and gain (e.g., periodic Si waveguides). Waveguides with such exceptional points have a strong degeneracy of their wavenumbers and polarization states that enables specific wave physics, only found in these degenerate systems. We will discuss advantages and disadvantages of both concepts to conceive laser regimes, related to high power, high spectral purity, high efficiency, etc, and show some realistic designs involving Si ridge waveguides. 

We present the experimental demonstration of the occurrence of exceptional points of degeneracy (EPDs) in a single resonator by introducing a linear time-periodic variation of one of its components. This is in contrast with the requirement of two coupled resonators with parity time-symmetric systems with precise values of gain and loss. In the proposed scheme, only the tuning of the modulation frequency is required, which is easily achieved in electronic systems. The EPD is a point in a system parameters’ space at which two or more eigenstates coalesce, and this leads to unique properties not occurring at other non-degenerate operating points. We show theoretically and experimentally the existence of a second-order EPD in a time-varying single resonator. Furthermore, we measure the sensitivity of the proposed system to a small structural perturbation and show that the two shifted system’s eigenfrequencies are well detected even for relative perturbations of [Formula: see text], with distinguished peaks well above the noise floor. We show that the regime of operation of the system at an EPD leads to a unique square-root-like sensitivity, which can devise new exceptionally sensitive sensors based on a single resonator by simply applying time modulation. 

A microstrip-technology three-way waveguide has been conceived to display exceptional modal degeneracy in the presence of periodic gain and radiation losses satisfying parity-time ( PT ) glide-symmetry. A third order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) is obtained in the modal dispersion relation, where three Floquet-Bloch eigenmodes coalesce at a single frequency, in their eigenvalues and polarization states. In the proposed structure, PT -glide-symmetry is achieved using periodically spaced lumped (radiation) loss and gain elements, each shifted by half a period. This particular degeneracy can be utilized in the design of devices such as radiating arrays with distributed amplifiers, arrays of oscillators, and sensors.