0000000000462529
AUTHOR
Danny O'shea
Ultrahigh-Q Tunable Whispering-Gallery-Mode Microresonator
Typical microresonators exhibit a large frequency spacing between resonances and a limited tunability. This impedes their use in a large class of applications which require a resonance of the microcavity to coincide with a predetermined frequency. Here, we experimentally overcome this limitation with highly prolate-shaped whispering-gallery-mode "bottle microresonators" fabricated from standard optical glass fibers. Our resonators combine an ultra-high quality factor of 360 million, a small mode volume, and near lossless fibre coupling, characteristic of whispering-gallery-mode resonators, with a simple and customizable mode structure enabling full tunability.
Bottle microresonator with actively stabilized evanescent coupling
The evanescent coupling of light between a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator and a sub-wavelength-diameter coupling fiber is actively stabilized by means of a Pound-Drever-Hall technique. We demonstrate the stabilization of a critically coupled resonator with a control bandwidth of 0.1 Hz, yielding a residual transmission of (9 \pm 3) \times 10^-3 for more than an hour. Simultaneously, the frequency of the resonator mode is actively stabilized.