  Optical microcavities have received much attention over the last decade from
different research fields ranging from fundamental issues of cavity QED to
specific applications such as microlasers and bio-sensors. A major issue in the
latter applications is the difficulty to obtain directional emission of light
in the far-field while keeping high energy densities inside the cavity (i.e.
high quality factor). To improve our understanding of these systems, we have
studied the annular cavity (a dielectric disk with a circular hole), where the
distance cavity-hole centers, d, is used as a parameter to alter the properties
of cavity resonances. We present results showing how one can affect the
directionality of the far-field while preserving the uniformity (hence the
quality factor) of the near-field simply by increasing the value of d.
Interestingly, the transition between a uniform near- and far-field to a
uniform near- and directional far-field is rather abrupt. We can explain this
behavior quite nicely with a simple model, supported by full numerical
calculations, and we predict that the effect will also be found in a large
class of eigenmodes of the cavity.
