Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first all-optical control scheme of ultrahigh-quality ($Q$)-factor silica microcavities, which can maintain their $Q$ factors over ${10}^8$ during the tuning process. For silica microcavities, the resonance tunability is very important and is also challenging for many applications. However, almost all previous works on resonance tuning deteriorate the $Q$ factors of silica microcavities at different levels, and evidently these schemes are not suitable for applications in which ultrahigh $Q$ factors are required. In this work, based on the proposed silica microbottle cavity and iron oxide nanoparticles, we realize all-optical control of the silica microcavity and maintain its $Q$ factor of around $1.2\times {10}^8$ during the tuning process. A tuning range of 85.9 GHz (0.68 nm) and a tuning sensitivity of 13.6 GHz/mW are obtained, and it is possible to realize full tunability by bridging the azimuthal free spectral range using six adjacent $q$-series modes. Moreover, all-optical control of the reflection spectrum is also carried out. This work will broaden the applications of ultrahigh-$Q$ silica microcavities in nonlinear optics, microwave photonics, cavity optomechanics, and cavity quantum electrodynamics.

© 2017 Optical Society of America

Tunable sub-kHz single-mode fiber laser based on a hybrid microbottle resonator

Ruilong Ma, Shixing Yuan, Song Zhu, Lei Shi, and Xinliang Zhang
Opt. Lett. 43(21) 5315-5318 (2018)

Iron-oxide nanoparticles embedded silica microsphere resonator exhibiting broadband all-optical wavelength tunability

Ping Zhao, Lei Shi, Yang Liu, Zheqi Wang, Shengli Pu, and Xinliang Zhang
Opt. Lett. 39(13) 3845-3848 (2014)

Kerr-induced controllable adiabatic frequency conversion in an ultrahigh Q silica toroid microcavity

Wataru Yoshiki, Yoshihiro Honda, Misako Kobayashi, Tomohiro Tetsumoto, and Takasumi Tanabe
Opt. Lett. 41(23) 5482-5485 (2016)

Chalcogenide microresonators tailored to distinct morphologies by the shaping of glasses on silica tapers

Ozan Aktaş
Opt. Lett. 42(5) 907-910 (2017)

External cavity lasing pumped stimulated Brillouin scattering in a high Q microcavity

Kaijun Che, Deyu Tang, Changlei Guo, Huiying Xu, Changyan Ren, Pan Zhang, Shuisen Jiang, Lujian Chen, Dan Zhang, and Zhiping Cai
Opt. Lett. 42(5) 935-938 (2017)