Squeezed light from a diamond-turned monolithic cavity

Abstract

For some crystalline materials, a regime can be found where continuous ductile cutting is feasible. Using precision diamond turning, such materials can be cut into complex optical components with high surface quality and form accuracy. In this work we use diamond-turning to machine a monolithic, square-shaped, doubly-resonant $LiNb{O}_3$ cavity with two flat and two convex facets. When additional mild polishing is implemented, the Q-factor of the resonator is found to be limited only by the material absorption loss. We show how our monolithic square resonator may be operated as an optical parametric oscillator that is evanescently coupled to free-space beams via birefringent prisms. The prism arrangement allows for independent and large tuning of the fundamental and second harmonic coupling rates. We measure $2.6\pm 0.5$ dB of vacuum squeezing at 1064 nm using our system. Potential improvements to obtain higher degrees of squeezing are discussed.

15 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Quantum Enhancement of the Zero-Area Sagnac Interferometer Topology for Gravitational Wave Detection
• Naturally-phasematched second harmonic generation in a whispering gallery mode resonator
• Observation of -9 dB quadrature squeezing with improvement of phase stability in homodyne measurement
• Quantum Light from a Whispering Gallery Mode Disk Resonator
• Observation of squeezed states with strong photon number oscillations
• Balanced Homodyne Detection of Optical Quantum States at Audio-Band Frequencies and Below
• Identifying modes of large whispering-gallery mode resonators from the spectrum and emission pattern
• Interfacing transitions of different alkali atoms and telecom bands using one narrowband photon pair source
• Highly efficient generation of single-mode photon pairs using a crystalline whispering gallery mode resonator

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Squeezed vacuum states from a whispering gallery mode resonator
• An efficient, tunable, and robust source of narrow-band photon pairs at the ${}^{87}$Rb D1 line
• Fabrication of Precision Hemispherical Mirrors for Quantum Optics Applications
• Toward a compact fibered squeezing parametric source
• General analytic theory of classical collinear three wave mixing in a monolithic cavity