Imperfect Fabry-Perot resonators

Klaassen, T. (2006)

Doctoral Thesis

The initial goal of this thesis was to demonstrate chaos in an open two-mirror resonator. We have designed a bifocal mirror that forms a resonator with an unstable inner and a stable outer part. To be able to distinguish phenomena unique for configuration from phenomena also present in conventional resonators, i.e., roughness-induced scattering and aberrations, the performance of a conventional stable resonator is investigated first. Roughness-induced scattering turns out to affect the cavity finesse as well as the average power throughput and produces mode coupling close to frequency-degenerate points. We demonstrate, furthermore, a method to accurately determine aberrations by measuring the Gouy phase of subsequent higher-order modes around frequency-degeneracy. The bifocal mirror is not fabricated by traditional grinding and polishing, but by diamond-machining. The eigenmodes of a resonator with one diamond-machined bifocal mirror turn out to be Laguerre-Gaussian. We demonstrate furthermore, the coupling of two resonators based on transmission spectra and patterns, and report on the ability of the configuration to fulfill the basic requirements to obtain chaos.

• Aberrations
• Cavity
• Chaos
• Effective index
• Fabry-Perot
• Frequency degeneracy
• Gouy phase
• Mode coupling
• Optical resonator
• Optical testing
• Scattering
• Waveguide

• All authors: Klaassen, T.
• Supervisor: Woerdman, J.P.
• Co-supervisor: Exter, M.P. van
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Faculty of Science, Leiden University
• Date: 2006-11-23
• Title of host publication: Casimir PhD Series
• ISBN (print): 9789085930181
• Name: 2006-11
• Sponsorship: stichtingen voor fundamenteel onderzoek der Materie (FOM)