Fabrication of high-Q defect-free optical nanofiber photonic crystal resonators

TL;DR

This paper reports the fabrication of defect-free optical nanofiber photonic crystal resonators with extremely high quality factors using femtosecond laser ablation, and explores their nonlinear optical properties for quantum and optical switching applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fabrication method for high-Q defect-free nanofiber resonators and investigates their thermo-optic nonlinearities in detail.

Findings

Quality factors exceeding 10^7 achieved

Thermo-optic effects dominate nonlinear response

Potential for high-speed quantum and optical switching

Abstract

We demonstrate the fabrication of defect-free optical-nanofiber photonic-crystal Fabry-Perot resonators with quality factors exceeding 10^7 using single-shot femtosecond laser ablation. An investigation of the nonlinear optical properties reveals that thermo-optic effects dominate within the entire cavity bandwidth, even when interrogating with pulses one order of magnitude shorter than the 6.6 us thermal cutoff time. The combination of high-Q and small mode volume of these resonators could facilitate the creation of high-speed quantum nodes for cavity QED based quantum computing and networking, as well as low-power in-line fiber optical switches.