Q spoiling in deformed optical microdisks due to resonance-assisted tunneling.

A recent experiment by Kwak et al. [Sci. Rep. 5, 9010 (2015)10.1038/srep09010] demonstrated the relevance of resonance-assisted tunneling for optical microcavities where resonance chains emerge in phase space due to boundary deformations. In this paper we adapt the perturbative description of resonance-assisted tunneling to calculate optical modes and the imaginary part of their complex wavenumber which determines the lifetime of the mode. We demonstrate our method at three example cavity shapes and compare our results to numerical data and perturbation theory for weakly deformed microdisk cavities.