ICP polishing of silicon for high quality optical resonators on a chip

Abstract

Miniature concave hollows, made by wet etching silicon through a circular mask, can be used as mirror substrates for building optical micro-cavities on a chip. In this paper we investigate how ICP polishing improves both shape and roughness of the mirror substrates. We characterise the evolution of the surfaces during the ICP polishing using white-light optical profilometry and atomic force microscopy. A surface roughness of 1 nm is reached, which reduces to 0.5 nm after coating with a high reflectivity dielectric. With such smooth mirrors, the optical cavity finesse is now limited by the shape of the underlying mirror.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Achievements and Perspectives of Optical Fiber Fabry-Perot Cavities
• Design and fabrication of diffractive atom chips for laser cooling and trapping
• Arrays of open, independently tunable microcavities
• Improved surface quality of anisotropically etched silicon {111} planes for mm-scale integrated optics
• Probing atoms and molecules close to macroscopic bodies