Abstract
Fiber Fabry-Perot cavities, formed by micro-machined mirrors on the end-facets of optical fibers, are used in an increasing number of technical and scientific applications, where they typically require precise stabilization of their optical resonances. Here, we study two different approaches to construct fiber Fabry-Perot resonators and stabilize their length for experiments in cavity quantum electrodynamics with neutral atoms. A piezo-mechanically actuated cavity with feedback based on the Pound-Drever-Hall locking technique is compared to a novel rigid cavity design that makes use of the high passive stability of a monolithic cavity spacer and employs thermal self-locking and external temperature tuning. Furthermore, we present a general analysis of the mode matching problem in fiber Fabry-Perot cavities, which explains the asymmetry in their reflective line shapes and has important implications for the optimal alignment of the fiber resonators. Finally, we discuss the issue of fiber-generated background photons. We expect that our results contribute towards the integration of high-finesse fiber Fabry-Perot cavities into compact and robust quantum-enabled devices in the future.
Highlights
In recent years optical high-finesse resonators with small mode volumes have become powerful tools for enhancing the interaction between light and matter
The treatment of the reflective coupling problem in terms of the interference of spatially mode filtered light fields gives rise to two important practical results for fiber Fabry–Perot cavities (FFPCs): First, our calculations show that for strongly overcoupled FFPCs, where the transmission of the incoupling mirror strongly exceeds the sum of all other contributions to the round-trip losses (THT ≫ TLT + LLT + LHT), the alignment that maximizes the depth of reflected incoupling dip does not maximize the spatial mode matching efficiency ǫHT
We formulate the reflective mode matching problem for free-space coupled Fabry–Perot cavities and FFPCs, and we show that the connection between the cavity mode matching and the observable cavity reflection signals fundamentally differs for the two cases
Summary
In recent years optical high-finesse resonators with small mode volumes have become powerful tools for enhancing the interaction between light and matter. Additional challenges, which need to be considered for FFPCs but do not occur for cavities with macroscopic mirror substrates, arise from the direct fiber coupling of light to the resonator mode. In this article we address the issue of cavity stabilization by studying two different architectures for high-finesse fiber Fabry–Perot resonators.
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