Saddle-Shape Whispering Gallery Mode Microresonators
Eyal Yacoby, Yosef London
Abstract
Optical Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) resonators are an ideal platform for highly sensitive sensors and nonlinear interactions. They exhibit extremely high quality (Q) factors, providing a sensing platform with low detection limit to environmental changes and optical confinement for low threshold nonlinear stimulation. Here we demonstrate a new type of WGM resonator we coin as a Saddle-Shape Microresonator (SSM). The unique modal properties of the SSM's WGMs significantly differs them from spheres, disks, toroids, and other well-known microresonator types. We show that the SSM offers, in addition to the many attractive attributes that are found in “fiber-tip” sphere microresonators, the added characteristic of structural stability of a taper coupled resonator. The combination of these traits make it ideal for strain-based sensing, cavity quantum electrodynamics, and for real life applications in which mechanical tunability of the microresonator's WGMs is essential. The distinctive structure of SSMs – allowing exceptional high mechanical stability as well as mechanical tunability – opens a route to manufacture miniature packaged fiber-coupled WGM microresonators-based devices.