Slow-Light-Enhanced Optical Imaging of Microfiber Radius Variations with Subangstrom Precision
| Autor: | Arno Rauschenbeutel, Jürgen Volz, Philipp Schneeweiss, Michael Scheucher, Khaled Kassem |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Physics - Instrumentation and Detectors
Materials science business.product_category Optical fiber Silica fiber business.industry Physics::Optics General Physics and Astronomy 02 engineering and technology Radius 021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology Slow light 01 natural sciences law.invention Optics law 0103 physical sciences Microfiber Microscopy Fiber Photonics 010306 general physics 0210 nano-technology business Physics - Optics |
| Zdroj: | Physical Review Applied. 14 |
| ISSN: | 2331-7019 |
| DOI: | 10.1103/physrevapplied.14.064052 |
| Popis: | Optical fibers play a key role in many different fields of science and technology. In particular, fibers with a diameter of several micrometers are intensively used in photonics. For these applications, it is often important to precisely know and control the fiber radius. Here, we demonstrate a novel technique to determine the local radius variation of a 30-micrometer diameter silica fiber with sub-\AA ngstr\"om precision with axial resolution of several tens of micrometers over a fiber length of more than half a millimeter. Our method relies on taking an image of the fiber's whispering-gallery modes (WGMs). In these WGMs, the speed of light propagating along the fiber axis is strongly reduced. This enables us to determine the fiber radius with a significantly enhanced precision, far beyond the diffraction limit. By exciting different axial modes, we verify the precision and reproducibility of our method and demonstrate that we can achieve a precision better than 0.3 \AA. The method can be generalized to other experimental situations where slow light occurs and, thus, has a large range of potential applications in the realm of precision metrology and optical sensing. Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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