Fundamental Thermal Noise Limits for Optical Microcavities
Name
PhysRevX.10.041046.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
5.51 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ebefffe2f698c8030a7b695bbce15c8b
Author(s)
Panuski, Christopher
Englund, Dirk
Hamerly, Ryan
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Physical Review X
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Panuski, Christopher, Englund, Dirk and Hamerly, Ryan. 2020. "Fundamental Thermal Noise Limits for Optical Microcavities." Physical Review X, 10 (4).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. We present a joint theoretical and experimental analysis of thermorefractive noise in high-quality-factor (Q), small-mode-volume (V) optical microcavities. Analogous to well-studied stability limits imposed by Brownian motion in macroscopic Fabry-Perot resonators, we show that microcavity thermorefractive noise gives rise to a mode-volume-dependent maximum effective quality factor. State-of-The-Art fabricated microcavities are found to be within one order of magnitude of this bound. By measuring the first thermodynamically limited frequency noise spectra of wavelength-scale high-Q/V silicon photonic crystal cavities, we confirm the assumptions of our theory, demonstrate a broadband sub-μK/Hz temperature sensitivity, and unveil a new technique for discerning subwavelength changes in microcavity mode volumes. To illustrate the immediate implications of these results, we show that thermorefractive noise limits the optimal performance of recently proposed room-Temperature, all-optical qubits using cavity-enhanced bulk material nonlinearities. Looking forward, we propose and analyze coherent thermo-optic noise cancellation as one potential avenue toward violating these bounds, thereby enabling continued development in quantum optical measurement, precision sensing, and low-noise integrated photonics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVX.10.041046
