Abstract
Silica and water are known as exceptionally inert chemical materials whose interaction is not completely understood. Here we show that the effect of this interaction can be significantly enhanced by optical whispering gallery modes (WGMs) propagating in a silica microcapillary filled with water. Our experiments demonstrate that WGMs, which evanescently heat liquid water over several hours, induce permanent alterations in silica material characterized by the subnanometer variation of the WGM spectrum. We use the discovered effect to fabricate optical WGM microresonators having potential applications in optical signal processing and microfluidic sensing. Our results pave the way for the ultraprecise fabrication of resonant optical microdevices and the ultra-accurate characterization of physical and chemical processes at solid–liquid interfaces.
Highlights
Silica and water are known as exceptionally inert chemical materials whose interaction is not completely understood
In this Letter, we show that it is possible to initiate, enhance, and characterize the dramatically small alterations near the interface of silica and liquid water with optical whispering gallery modes (WGMs) excited in a water-filled silica microcapillary fiber (MCF)
Optical WGM microresonators and WGM microcapillaries in particular have found numerous applications ranging from ultraprecise microfluidic and microparticle sensing[38−41] to signal processing in telecommunication, frequency comb generation, and quantum networking.[38,42−44] Our experiments demonstrate that the WGMs excited in a silica microcapillary filled with water can induce temporal as well as permanent alterations of the silica material and perform an unprecedentedly precise characterization of these alterations with the minute-scale temporal resolution, micron-scale spatial resolution along the MCF length, and picometer resolution in WGM spectrum variation
Summary
Silica and water are known as exceptionally inert chemical materials whose interaction is not completely understood. Light that coupled from MF1 into the MCF excited WGMs, which contributed to the transmission power spectrogram P(λ, z) measured as a function of wavelength λ and coordinate z along the MCF axis.
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