Photothermal effects in ultra-precisely stabilized tunable microcavities

Abstract

We study the mechanical stability of a tunable high-finesse microcavity under ambient conditions and investigate light-induced effects that can both suppress and excite mechanical fluctuations. As an enabling step, we demonstrate the ultra-precise electronic stabilization of a microcavity. We then show that photothermal mirror expansion can provide high-bandwidth feedback and improve cavity stability by almost two orders of magnitude. At high intracavity power, we observe self-oscillations of mechanical resonances of the cavity. We explain the observations by a dynamic photothermal instability, leading to parametric driving of mechanical motion. For an optimized combination of electronic and photothermal stabilization, we achieve a feedback bandwidth of $500$kHz and a noise level of $1.1\times 10^{-13}$m rms.

References in corpus (8)

• Strong atom-field coupling for Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical cavity on a chip
• Fiber Fabry-Perot cavity with high finesse
• A single ion coupled to an optical fiber cavity
• Opto-Mechanics of deformable Fabry-Perot Cavities
• Cavity-funneled generation of indistinguishable single photons from strongly dissipative quantum emitters
• A small mode volume tunable microcavity: development and characterization
• Frequency splitting of polarization eigenmodes in microscopic Fabry-Perot cavities
• Cavity quantum electrodynamics with charge-controlled quantum dots coupled to a fiber Fabry-Perot cavity

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Photothermal optomechanics in superfluid helium coupled to a fiber-based cavity