A small mode volume tunable microcavity: development and characterization
Abstract
We report the realization of a spatial and spectrally tunable air-gap Fabry-Perot type microcavity of high finesse and cubic-wavelength-scale mode volume. These properties are attractive in the fields of opto-mechanics, quantum sensing and foremost cavity quantum electrodymanics. The major design feature is a miniaturized concave mirror with atomically smooth surface and radius of curvature as low as 10 micrometer produced by CO2 laser ablation of fused silica. We demonstrate excellent mode-matching of a focussed laser beam to the microcavity mode and confirm from the frequencies of the resonator modes that the effective optical radius matches the physical radius. With these small radii, we demonstrate sub-wavelength beam waists. We also show that the microcavity is sufficiently rigid for practical applications: in a cryostat at 4K, the root-mean-square microcavity length fluctuations are below 5 pm.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1408.1357,
title = {A small mode volume tunable microcavity: development and characterization},
author = {Lukas Greuter and Sebastian Starosielec and Daniel Najer and Arne Ludwig and Luc Duempelmann and Dominik Rohner and Richard J. Warburton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.1357},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
The following article has been submitted to \emph{Applied Physics Letters}. After it is published, it will be found at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl