Micro-fabricated mirrors with finesse exceeding one million

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable fabrication method for high-finesse optical mirrors with customizable curvature, achieving finesse over one million, enabling advanced quantum optics and precision measurement applications.

Contribution

Introduces a novel, scalable fabrication technique for ultrahigh finesse mirrors with customizable curvature, surpassing traditional polishing methods.

Findings

Achieved finesse up to 1.3 million in fabricated resonators.

Maintained sub-Angstrom surface roughness across diverse geometries.

Demonstrated coating-limited finesse averaging over 1.05 million.

Abstract

The Fabry-P\'erot resonator is one of the most widely used optical devices, enabling scientific and technological breakthroughs in diverse fields including cavity QED, optical clocks, precision length metrology and spectroscopy. Though resonator designs vary widely, all high-end applications benefit from mirrors with the lowest loss and highest finesse possible. Fabrication of the highest finesse mirrors relies on centuries-old mechanical polishing techniques, which offer losses at the part-per-million (ppm) level. However, no existing fabrication techniques are able to produce high finesse resonators with the large range of mirror geometries needed for scalable quantum devices and next-generation compact atomic clocks. In this paper, we introduce a new and scalable approach to fabricate mirrors with ultrahigh finesse ($\geq 10^{6}$) and user-defined radius of curvature spanning four orders of magnitude ($10^{-4}-10^{0}$ m). We employ photoresist reflow and reactive ion etching to shape and transfer mirror templates onto a substrate while maintaining sub-Angstrom roughness. This substrate is coated with a dielectric stack and used to create arrays of compact Fabry-P\'erot resonators with finesse values as high as 1.3 million and measured excess loss $<$ 1 ppm. Optical ringdown measurements of 43 devices across 5 substrates reveal that the fabricated cavity mirrors -- with both small and large radii of curvature -- produce an average coating-limited finesse of 1.05 million. This versatile new approach opens the door to scalable fabrication of high-finesse miniaturized Fabry-P\'erot cavities needed for emerging quantum optics and frequency metrology technologies.