1. Introduction

Fiber Fabry-Perot (FFP) microcavities with CO₂ laser-machined concave mirrors [1, 2] are being used in a fast-growing number of applications, ranging from cavity quantum electrodynamics with atomic, molecular and solid-state emitters [1, 3–7] and optomechanical systems [8] to Raman spectrometers for atmospheric gases [9] and new scanning microscopy techniques [10]. This range of applications could be further increased, and a gap in micro-optical technology could be filled, by increasing the optical length L of these cavities to the millimeter range while maintaining their crucial advantages such as built-in fiber coupling, small mode waist, high finesse and high passive stability. Development towards this goal has been initiated by the ion trap community [11, 12], where FFP cavities are now arguably the most promising candidate for realizing a high-fidelity light-matter quantum interface. In this application, increased cavity length will mitigate or even remove the perturbation of the trapping potential induced by the dielectric mirrors. With neutral atoms, increased mirror distance will allow elongated atomic ensembles to be placed in the cavity, as required for improving compact, trapped-atom atomic clocks [13] by cavity squeezing [14, 15]. Finally, because of the reduced free spectral range, larger L will also make it possible to use laser-machined concave mirrors in telecom applications of FFP cavities, where planar mirrors [16] are currently being used in commercial solutions [17].

Two factors have limited L in earlier FFP implementations. First, the nonspherical profile generated by a single CO₂ laser pulse causes additional losses which are negligible for short cavities, but become important long before L reaches the stability limit [2,11,12,18]. The Gaussian rather than spherical shape [2] limits the effective mirror diameter, even when a very large CO₂ beam diameter is used [19]. Shape deviations due to the doping of the fiber core [12] and to the restricted heat flow in the fiber [20] also contribute to this limitation. Second, because FFPs have no mode-matching optics, the mode field diameter of the fiber determines the coupling efficiency between the fiber and cavity mode. With typical mirror curvatures, the standard single-mode (SM) fibers used in earlier FFP implementations provide near-perfect mode matching to short cavities, and are used with great success in cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments. Resonant cavity transmission T_c rapidly drops, however, when L is increased beyond a few hundred μm [2, 11].

Concerning the mirror profile, a natural approach is to use multiple CO₂ laser pulses on the same fiber, instead of a single pulse. A first application of this approach was demonstrated recently in [12], where the fiber was rotated about its axis between pulses. The main purpose of this rotation was to reduce mirror ellipticity, but the technique also resulted in larger mirror profiles, enabling values of L up to 400 μm before the finesse dropped by 50%, for cavities with one SM fiber. However, the mirror profile still remained Gaussian and the problem of reduced transmission remained unsolved.

Here, we overcome both limitations. To address the mirror shape limitation, we apply a newly developed CO₂ dot milling technique, where a large number of weak individual pulses sequentially address an optimized pattern of target points on the substrate surface. This method gives access to a wide range of shapes with extremely precise control over the surface profile, while maintaining the excellent surface roughness that is characteristic of CO₂ machining. Here we show that it enables fabrication of large, spherical structures, as required for long cavities, with a shape deviation of less than λ/20. To address the mode-matching issue, we use large-mode-area photonic-crystal (PC) fibers, also known as “endlessly single-mode” fibers [21]. We find that CO₂ machining produces excellent results on these fibers when the holes are collapsed adequately. To measure the performance of the improved mirrors, we have built cavities and performed finesse and transmission measurements. L > 1.6mm is reached before the finesse drops by 50%. We present measurements of finesse as a function of L for different cavities and compare them to simulations that use the measured mirror profiles, finding good agreement. These simulations also clarify the impact of doping-related shape variations. We also measure cavity transmisson over the full length range and directly compare the results of a PC-multimode (MM) fiber cavity to a SM-MM cavity with similar mirror parameters. We find that the PC fiber improves the transmission by an order of magnitude for cavity lengths beyond 1 mm.

2. The role of the cavity mode radius on the fiber mirrors

The mode radius of the cavity mode on the mirrors plays an important role for both the losses and the mode matching. Limiting ourselves to symmetric cavities for simplicity, the mode radius on the cavity mirrors is $w_m=w_c\sqrt{1+{\left(L/(2z_R)\right)}^2}$ where $w_c=\sqrt{\lambda /(2\pi )}{\left(L(2R-L)\right)}^{1/4}$ is the waist radius of the cavity mode and $z_R=\pi w_c^2/\lambda$ its Rayleigh range, R is the radius of curvature (ROC) of the mirrors, L the cavity length, and λ the wavelength. A small w_m has the advantage of minimizing the clipping losses due to the finite mirror diameter (see Sec. 5 below). Additionally, for the long cavities that we are targeting here, w_m tends to be larger than the mode field radius of the input fiber, w_f. This reduces the power coupling efficiency ε from the fiber to the cavity, and consequently, the overall (fiber-to-fiber) resonant cavity transmission T_c. Here as well, reducing w_m is beneficial. The smallest w_m that can be reached for a given L is realized for R = L, i.e., a confocal cavity. In that case,

The fiber-to-cavity power coupling efficiency can be approximated by the mode overlap of two Gaussian modes [22],

Figure 1(a) shows this coupling efficiency for different α. The optimum coupling ε_max for a given α is reached for $w_f/w_c=\sqrt[4]{1+{\alpha }^2}$. For configurations with 0 ≤ α ≲ 1, this corresponds to 1 ≤ w_f/w_c ≲ 1.2: for cavity lengths up to the confocal length, the optimum fiber mode radius is always close to the waist of the cavity mode. A coupling efficiency rigorously equal to 1 can only be reached for α = 0, but high coupling efficiencies ε > 0.8 are possible for a wide range of α values, as shown in Fig. 1(b). Whether these efficiencies can actually be realized experimentally depends on the availability of a suitable fiber. For long cavities, we have already seen that w_m tends to be larger than typical fiber modes, and can also cause losses due to finite mirror diameter. Therefore, a good working point for these cavities is close to the confocal configuration α = 1, where w_m is smallest. Note that further optimization is possible in situations where asymmetric cavities can be employed, notably for plano-concave configurations with asymmetric reflectivity.

 

Fig. 1 (a) Power coupling between the incoupling fiber mode and the mode of a symmetric cavity for different values of α (the cavity length normalized to the Rayleigh range of the cavity mode). The red dashed lines indicate the increased power coupling expected from the use of a PC fiber (w_f = 8.2 μm) with respect to a standard SM fiber (w_f = 3 μm) for an example cavity with w₀ = 14.1 μm and L = 1.2mm. The blue shaded area shows the stability region of the symmetric cavity. (b) Maximum achievable power coupling for a given α.

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3. Photonic-crystal fibers for FFP cavities

The discussion above shows that mode matching for long fiber cavities can be substantially improved by using a fiber with larger mode field diameter. It is known that large-core multimode fibers improve the transmission (see [12] for a direct comparison). However, the need for a well-defined, stable coupling usually makes them a bad choice on the input side of the cavity [23,24]. A promising alternative, which we explore here, is to use single-mode fibers with large mode area. Such fibers are available based on different technologies. Here we use photonic-crystal (PC) fibers.

Let us evaluate the power coupling that can be expected for L = 1.2mm, which is the targeted cavity length in our application. In practice, at the confocal point itself, stability is compromised by the fact that the mirror ROCs have some tolerance from sample to sample (see sec. 4.4 below), so we choose to work at α ∼ 0.75. The required ROC to realize a given combination (α, L) is R = L/2 (1/α² + 1). For L = 1.2mm and α = 0.75, the required ROC is R = 1.67mm. The calculated cavity mode waist for these parameters is w_c = 14.1 μm at 780 nm. The red dashed lines in Fig. 1 show the expected power coupling efficiency of this mode to a standard SM fiber with w_f = 3μm, ε ≈ 11%, and to the NKT LMA20 photonic crystal fiber which we have used in our experiments, which has a specified near-field mode field radius of w_f = (8.2 ± 0.8)μm at 780 nm (see Tab. 1 below for more information). This w_f value leads to ε ≈ 58%, nearly a factor 6 higher than with the SM fiber. Note however that this idealized calculation neglects effects such as the non-Gaussian shape of the PC fiber mode, so its result should be considered as an upper limit.

Table 1. Fiber Types Used in the Experiments

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In addition to the improved mode coupling, these PC fibers are “endlessly single mode”, allowing stable single-mode guiding over a large wavelength range which can span more than an octave. Here, we will use them with a dual-wavelength coating optimized for 780 nm and 1560 nm.

4. Machining large spherical structures by CO₂ dot milling

4.1. Limiting factors in single-pulse machining

The profile of the depression generated by a single CO₂ laser pulse is Gaussian rather than spherical [2], so that the effective mirror diameter is significantly smaller than the diameter of the depression. Additionally, due to boundary effects in heat transport during the laser machining, it is difficult to machine depressions that extend over the full fiber surface [20], even with a very large CO₂ beam diameter [19]. The small effective mirror size causes clipping loss when the transverse mode size on the mirror becomes comparable to the effective mirror diameter. This typically happens long before L reaches to the stability limit [2, 11, 12, 18]. Finally, it is known that the milling profile of a given laser pulse is affected by the doping profile of the fiber [12]. The effect is most pronounced for SM fibers, where it leads to a circular ridge at the core-cladding interface. All three problems can be addressed by replacing the single CO₂ pulse by a series of pulses with different target positions.

4.2. Dot milling setup

Our machining setup is designed to enable surface machining with multiple, precisely positioned CO₂ pulses (“shots”) and analysis of the results on the fly. It has three main components: the CO₂ laser with external pulsing and focusing optics, a high-precision, three-axis translation stage, and an in-situ optical profilometer (Fig. 2). The complete setup is enclosed in a temperature-stabilized laminar flow box. A home-made motorized tilt stage (pitch and yaw) was mounted on the translation stages to align the fiber cleave surface perpendicular to the CO₂ beam axis before machining. The CO₂ part is similar to our earlier setups [2, 20]. Pulses are generated using a combination of pump switching and mechanical shutters [2]; pulse-to-pulse power fluctuations are on the order of 0.5%. The CO₂ focusing lens is a f = 25mm asphere illuminated with a beam diameter of 7 mm. In contrast to [2, 20], however, the CO₂ and profilometry beam paths are kept separated, with the translation stages ensuring reproducible travel between the two locations. The stages [25] have optical encoders for repeatble absolute positioning. The step size of the transverse stages is 50nm. The optical profilometer is based on a Mirau objective [26] with a nominal transverse resolution of 0.8 μm. To achieve best height (z) resolution, we use phase-shifting profilometry [27]. The measured noise for a reference surface is 1.4nm rms for a single profile, which can be further reduced to the sub-nm level by averaging several profiles. To localize the fiber core of SM fibers, weak light is coupled into the fiber, so that the core appears as a bright spot on the microscope image. The whole system is software-controlled and allows for automated centering.

 

Fig. 2 CO₂ dot milling setup: Precision translation stages are used to control the CO₂ beam position on the fiber and to translate the fiber to the optical profiler position for surface characterization. Light coupled into the fiber core allows a precise centering of the mirror profile. The CO₂ focusing lens (FL) is a f = 25mm asphere illuminated with a beam diameter of 7 mm.

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With this improved setup, the measured average centering error of a CO₂ shot with respect to the fiber core is 0.9 μm, which is a significant improvement over the earlier setup, and just sufficient to achieve reproducible mode-matching between the fiber and cavity modes. The remaining error has contributions from the translation stages (thermal drifts in particular), and possibly from the CO₂ laser’s beam pointing stability. The relative positions of the multiple shots making up the dot milling pattern have much better accuracy because they do not require the 4.5cm translation between the profiler and the CO2 beam, which is needed in the centering procedure.

4.3. Fiber preparation

We have machined three different fiber types, presented in Table 1. For good reproducibility of the machining results, it is important to control the cleave angle to tight tolerances. We have used a pneumatic cleaver with a specified typical cleave angle of less than 0.3 degrees [28]. Our measured mean cleave angle deviation was less than 0.4 degrees throughout, and below 0.2 degrees for the SM fibers. To achieve these results, the cleaver has to be calibrated carefully and the copper-coated fibers have to be straightend by hand before cleaving. For the PC fiber, simple cleaving exposes the holes of the photonic crystal. We found that direct machining on that structure was possible for profiles with R ≲ 300 μm. For the much shallower profiles of our targeted R > 1000 μm mirrors, this simple approach turned out to be problematic. Therefore, we have collapsed the holes before cleaving using the arc of a fusion splicer as described in Ref. [29]. The cleave was positioned at a distance d_c ∼ 50 – 100 μm from the onset of the collapsed region as shown in Fig. 3. Excellent results were achieved with the fibers prepared in that way. For shorter d_c, residues of the six-fold symmetry of the PC hole pattern remained visible in the machined structure.

 

Fig. 3 (a) Profilometer image of the surface of a PC fiber (NKT LMA 20) cleaved in the non-collapsed region, indicated by the arrow. (b) Side view of a PC fiber, showing the transition between the non-collapsed and collapsed regions. (c) Profilometer image of the surface for a cleave in the collapsed region. (The red crosshairs in (a) and (c) mark the center of the fiber.)

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4.4. Optimizing the dot milling process

Our fabrication goal was to obtain spherical mirror profiles with ROCs in the 1mm range, and with a useful diameter of 100 μm. We have achieved good results using identical CO₂ beam parameters for all dots in the pattern. For the results shown below, the beam had a 1/e² radius w = 140 μm, and its power was P = 2.3W. The pulse length τ was adjusted such that an individual milling pulse near the center of a flat (cleaved) MM fiber yielded a depression with depth t ∼ 100nm and diameter (2σ of a Gaussian fit) of ∼ 30 μm. This led to 17ms ≤ τ ≤ 25ms depending on the fiber type. This dot size is small enough to produce features with the required resolution and using about one hundred pulses, while a smaller beam diameter would require more pulses with no obvious advantage.

The milling process is highly nonlinear, so that the time order of the pulses also affects the result. Furthermore, due to the finite size of the fiber, the effect of a given pulse also depends on its distance from the center of the fiber surface. Therefore, finding a suitable milling pulse pattern requires some empirical testing to reduce the parameter space before a systematic optimization can be done.

We have used the following strategy: because the desired shape has rotational symmetry, the milling pulses are placed on concentric circles. The outmost circles are shot first. The number of pulses is limited to ∼ 100, because this range was empirically found to give good results and higher numbers brought no obvious improvements. To reduce effects of the shot order, neighboring pulse positions are not shot consecutively. The number and diameters of the circles are optimized experimentally by minimizing the difference between the measured profile and a spherical surface over a circular region of interest. A typical pulse pattern is shown in Fig. 4(a). Once the pattern is optimized, processing and characterizing a single fiber with a typical 75-dot pattern takes less than 2 minutes.

 

Fig. 4 Large spherical surface machined on a 200 μm diameter SM fiber. (a) Interferogram of the surface after processing. The red circle shows the initial fiber diameter, the green circle shows the area over which the structure was optimized. The crosshairs indicate the center of the fiber. The red dots indicate the positions of the CO₂ pulses (b) Surface profile measured by phase-shifting interferometry. (The grey area was added to indicate the fiber orientation.)

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Using this type of pattern, we have produced mirror profiles on SM, MM and PC fibers. Figures 4 and 5 show sample results. The shot positions and parameters were optimized for R = 1500 μm, where the mean deviation from a 2D spherical fit is smaller than 12 nm, and the maximum deviation smaller than 40 nm, over a circular region of interest with a diameter of 100 μm. Between samples processed with identical parameters, the measured R varies by about ±10% on SM and MM fibers, and by about ±20% on PC fibers. Within some limits, larger and smaller profiles can be machined by simply changing the pulse length and scaling the shot positions, without optimizing anew. When machining smaller R with the profile of Fig. 4, the mean deviation increases up to 59 nm for R = 330 μm. When producing R > 1500 μm the mean deviation does not increase significantly, but cleave imperfections start to compromise the symmetry of the structure. The ellipticity R_a − R_b/R_a is below 10%, where R_a and R_b are the radii of the large and the small axis, respectively, of a 2D fit to the measured profile over a region of 100 μ diameter. This ellipticity could in principle be further reduced by adapting the milling pattern. However, ellipticity-induced birefringent splitting of the cavity resonance frequencies scales as 1/L [19], making it a small effect for the comparatively long cavities considered here. Therefore, we did not attempt such an optimization here.

 

Fig. 5 (a) Cut along the x axis of a spherical profile on a 220 μm diameter MM fiber and corresponding cut of a two-dimensional spherical fit (R = 1475 μm) on a circular region with a diameter of 100 μm. (The shaded area in (a) and (b) indicates the fit region.) (b) Cut along the x axis of the fit residuals. (c) 2D fit residuals.

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With SM fibers, we also observe a shape deviation of 20–40nm height located near the interface between the cladding and doped core, similar to that reported in [12] for several pulses on the fiber center. It can be compensated to some extent by slight adjustments in the milling pattern, with the results shown in Fig. 6. Collapsed PC fibers do not experience this effect, which makes them particularly suitable for CO₂ processing. Likewise, large-core MM fibers are also easy to process because of their large, homogeneous central region.

 

Fig. 6 Influence of the doped core region. Shown are the residuals of a 2D spherical fit for machined SM and PC fiber surfaces. The milling patterns are very similar for both fibers and are close to the one shown in Fig. 4(a). 73 pulses were used for the SM fiber and 70 for the PC fiber; the pulse length is τ = 17.6ms for the SM fiber and τ = 20ms for the PC fiber. The data is the average of 120 profile measurements for each fiber (see Sec. 5.3). The radius of the fit region was chosen to be 18 μm because this is the mode radius on the fiber for a cavity of length L = 1200 μm and a ROC R = 1650 μm. The fit for the PC fiber gives R = 1492μm and the residual shows only a slow modulation, which could probably be further reduced by fine-tuning the pulse length of the last, central pulse. By contrast, the residual of the standard SM fiber (fitted R = 1508μm) shows a strong variation at the fiber center at the interface between core an cladding material.

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5. Long fiber Fabry-Perot cavities

We have machined a large number of SM, MM and PC fibers and had them coated with an ion-beam sputtered (IBS), dual-wavelength high-reflectivity coating [30] for 780 nm and 1560 nm. (This particular coating was chosen as required for our application, where Rb atoms are trapped in a far off-resonant dipole trap inside the cavity.) Its nominal transmission is 𝒯 = 30ppm at 780 nm and 1560 nm; the sum 𝒯 + ℒ is 66 ± 2ppm at 780 nm and 34 ± 2ppm at 1560 nm, as determined from finesse measurements on short FFP cavities.

5.1. Finesse and transmission measurement

We have built high-finesse cavities from fiber pairs of different fiber types using a three-axis translation stage equipped with piezo actuators (Thorlabs MAX311D/M) and a two-axis rotation stage (Thorlabs PR01/M, GNL10/M). Several PC-MM cavities were tested at both wavelengths. Compared to cavities with the standard Gaussian-shaped fiber mirrors, the difference was striking. With mirror ROCs on the order of 1 mm, we could readily achieve stable cavities with sizeable transmission for lengths L > 1mm – a length never achieved with the Gaussian-shaped mirrors (Fig. 7(a)).

 

Fig. 7 (a) Microscope image of a fiber Fabry-Perot cavity with a PC fiber (left) and a MM fiber (right). The fibers were illuminated from the back to obtain a high contrast for cavity length measurement. The collapsed region of the PC fiber is visible. (b) Experimental results (filled symbols) and simulations (empty symbols with dotted lines, see 5.3) for the finesse as a function of length. Results are shown for an SM-MM cavity (red triangles) with R₁ = 1508 ± 65 μm and R₂ = 1629 ± 73 μm and for a PC-MM cavity (blue circles) with R₁ = 1492 ± 110 μm and R₂ as before. (The MM fiber is the same in both cavities.) The blue solid line shows the result of the analytical clipping loss formula (6) fitted to the PC-MM data. The fit parameters are given in Table 2. (c) Transmission of the cavities. The PC fiber improves transmission by more than an order of magnitude for L > 1mm. The lines show the calculated transmission using Eq. (7) and the mode field radius w_f given in the legend. w_f = 6.1 μm is the mode field radius measured independently for the PC fiber (see Sec. 5.4). The blue dashed line for w_f = 4.5 μm fits the PC data well, but the large deviation from the nominal value of the PC mode field radius remains unexplained. The sharp drop in finesse and transmission around L = 1650 μm corresponds to the unstable region R₁ < L < R₂ of the slightly asymmetric cavity.

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The cavities performed well at both wavelengths, and the measured finesse values were consistent with the coating specifications. With traditional SM fibers, it would be impossible to use the same FFP cavity with wavelengths so far apart. The optical measurements presented below were performed using an external-cavity diode laser at 780nm. The cavity length L was measured with a simple video microscope. The free spectral range (FSR) was calculated from L as ν_FSR = c/2L. The cavity length was then scanned around this position using the piezo. The linewidth δν of the TEM₀₀ mode was measured using an electro-optic modulator to generate sidebands for frequency calibration.

These measurements were repeated for different cavity lengths over the full stability range. Cavity transmission on resonance was also measured for every length. In order to eliminate the uncertainty associated with coupling a free-space beam into the cavity fiber, we have first injected the free-space beam into an open-ended fiber and measured the power emerging from the open end before splicing it to the mirror fiber. In this way, the uncertainty is only given by the splice. Based on previous splices, we estimate splice transmission to be T_splice ≳ 0.97 for SM fibers, and T_splice ≳ 0.9 for PC fibers. (The typical value for the PC case is closer to 0.95, but is very sensitive to all splice preparations, such as the cleave angle.)

Figure 7(b) and (c) show the finesse ℱ = ν_FSR/δν and resonant transmission T_c measured at 780 nm as a function of cavity length for two different cavities: one with an SM fiber (ROC measured by optical profilometry: R₁ = 1508 ± 65 μm) on the incoupling side and a MM fiber (R₂ = 1629 ± 73 μm) for outcoupling; the other with the same MM fiber, but a PC fiber (R₁ = 1492 ± 110 μm) on the incoupling side. Because the ROCs are not exactly equal, an unstable region exists for both cavities where R₁ < L < R₂. This is clearly visible in the finesse and transmission data. Comparing the performance of the two cavities, the PC-MM configuration is superior in every respect. It shows higher transmission, especially for large L. This was expected and validates the choice of the PC fiber, although the experimental values do not reach the theoretical optimum yet (see Sec. 5.4 below). Furthermore, with this cavity, ℱ is almost constant up to L ∼ 1.5mm, whereas with the SM-MM cavity, it decreases significantly with L, even for short lengths. Such a decrease has been observed for all FFP cavities involving SM fibers [11,12,18]; the authors of [12] have conjectured that it is likely to be caused by the ridge in the mirror profile (cf. Fig. 6). We confirm this quantitatively using a numerical simulation that takes into account the measured mirror profile, as described below in Sec. 5.3. This adverse effect is virtually absent with PC fibers, giving them an additional advantage in FFP cavities.

5.2. Analytical model: Clipping loss

Clipping loss for Gaussian cavity modes can be described with a simple analytical model [2]. The finesse of a high-finesse Fabry-Perot cavity as a function of the mirror properties is

Table 2. Mirror Diameters and ROCs Deduced from the Finesse Data (see Fig. 7(b))

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For the SM-MM cavity, ℱ drops linearly with increasing L (red dots in Fig. 7(b)). The simple clipping loss model of Eq. (6) does not fit this data with any reasonable parameters. This indicates that the loss is not related to clipping on the mirror edges, but has its origin in irregularities of the machined structures shown in Fig. 6. This is confirmed by the numerical simulations which we will now describe.

5.3. Full simulation of the cavity mode using reconstructed mirror surfaces

To gain further insight into the role of structure imperfections, and to be able to predict the performance of the machined structures without building a cavity or even applying a coating, we have performed numerical simulations of the cavity eigenmodes using the measured surface profiles. We have used the FFT toolbox OSCAR [31]. This toolbox simulates cavity eigenmodes for arbitrary mirror profiles, which are represented as 2D arrays of height information. Each of the profiles used in our simulation is the average of 120 profiles of the same fiber taken in succession to reduce noise. Apart from this averaging, no fit or filter was used to process the profile data. The profiles here were taken after coating, but no significant deformation with respect to the profiles of the uncoated structures could be seen.

The simulations covered the full field of view of the profiler (cf. Fig. 4(a)) with a grid resolution of 1.17 μm. The alignment procedure for the simulation is analogous to that of a real cavity: the two profiles are spaced by a fixed distance L, and the resonance closest to the target cavity length is found. By tilting and translating one of the profiles, the transmission signal is optimized. In our simulations, we have not attempted to rotate the profiles around the cavity axis. Their relative angle is left at an arbitrary value and is not changed in the optimization. This is justified when the deviation from rotational symmetry is small, as is the case here. The computation time for a single cavity length, including the alignment procedure, was on the order of one hour on a generic desktop PC. To reach such a reasonable time, the simulations were carried out with higher mirror transmission (𝒯_sim = 0.01) compared to the experiment. This has no effect on the simulated clipping and scattering losses of the mirrors. The losses and transmission of the coating, which are not contained in the simulation, are experimentally determined by short-cavity finesse measurements and added to the simulated diffraction losses to determine the finesse using Eq. (5). The results of the simulated finesse are shown in Fig. 7(b) as empty symbols connected by dotted lines for both cavities. Simulation and experiment are in excellent agreement, which confirms that the linear decay of the finesse for the standard single-mode fiber is explained by the structure itself. Additional loss effects from coating variations (as discussed in [11, 32]) are not significant here. Furthermore, this remarkable agreement means that such simulations could be used to optimize structures produced by laser dot milling without laborious iterations of coating and cavity construction.

5.4. Cavity transmission

To compare the measured cavity transmissions to theoretical expectations, we have used the simple model described in [2]. The power coupling efficiency ε between the input fiber and the cavity mode (Eq. (2)) limits the resonant transmission T_c of a symmetric FFP cavity as

6. Conclusion

These results show that CO₂ laser dot milling and large mode area photonic-crystal fibers form a powerful combination. The maximum length is extended into the millimeter range while maintaining the advantages of a miniature, robust, fiber-based approach and an acceptable overall transmission. Our results also indicate that an improved hole-collapsing process is likely to further improve the transmission. The finesse ℱ ∼ 50000 reached in our data is limited by the dual-wavelength coating. The surface roughness of the CO₂ process admits still higher values, and it will be interesting to see whether these can also be reached at the length scale introduced here. For a state-of-the-art single-wavelength coating, total absorption and scattering losses ℒ_A + ℒ_S = 2 × 13.5ppm have been measured for a pair of fiber mirrors [19]. Choosing a transmission of the same value, and adding the clipping losses of 5.5 ppm per mirror estimated by the simulations shown above for a cavity of L = 1mm, it should be possible to produce FFP cavities of L = 1mm and a finesse of up to 97,000 with the method presented here. Beyond the cavity QED applications for which we have originally developed it, we note that the free spectral range for a 1.5 mm fiber cavity is is 100 GHz, approaching an interesting range for filtering applications.