Rectangular SNAP microresonator fabricated with a femtosecond laser

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new femtosecond laser fabrication method for SNAP microresonators, achieving a 50-fold increase in nanoscale effective radius variation contrast and enabling smaller, more precise optical structures for advanced applications.

Contribution

A novel femtosecond laser fabrication technique for SNAP microresonators that significantly enhances ERV contrast and reduces structure size compared to previous methods.

Findings

Achieved ERV contrast of ~1 nm/um, 50 times higher than previous methods.

Fabricated a rectangular SNAP resonator with good agreement between experiment and theory.

Reduced axial scale of SNAP structures by an order of magnitude.

Abstract

SNAP microresonators, which are fabricated by nanoscale effective radius variation (ERV) of the optical fiber with sub-angstrom precision, can be potentially used as miniature classical and quantum signal processors, frequency comb generators, as well as ultraprecise microfluidic and environmental optical sensors. Many of these applications require the introduction of nanoscale ERV with a large contrast {\alpha} which is defined as the maximum shift of the fiber cutoff wavelength introduced per unit length of the fiber axis. The previously developed fabrication methods of SNAP structures, which used focused CO2 and femtosecond laser beams, achieved {\alpha} ~ 0.02 nm/um. Here we develop a new fabrication method of SNAP microresonators with a femtosecond laser which allows us to demonstrate a 50-fold improvement of previous results and achieve {\alpha} ~ 1 nm/um. Furthermore, our fabrication method enables the introduction of ERV which is several times larger than the maximum ERV demonstrated previously. As an example, we fabricate a rectangular SNAP resonator and investigate its group delay characteristics. Our experimental results are in good agreement with theoretical simulations. Overall, the developed approach allows us to reduce the axial scale of SNAP structures by an order of magnitude.