Phoxonic glass cavities based on whispering gallery mode resonators

Abstract

A variety of studies have been performed on WGM microresonators made of different materials and exploiting very high quality factors. This feature has allowed their use in a broad variety of applications including micro-lasers, optical filtering and switching, frequency conversion through non-linear effects, RF photonics and sensing. The easiest way to shape a glass spheroid with high quality factor is to use the surface tension during the thermal reflow of a highly transparent amorphous dielectric. Depending on the application, alternatives shapes like micro-bubbles or micro-bottles can be implemented in order to obtain specific performances. This manuscript reports the results we obtained on micro-laser sources in erbium doped microspheres, parametric frequency conversion in silica microspheres, stimulated Brillouin scattering in silica microbubbles, and non-linear effects in polymer coated or fluorophore filled glass microcavities.

Keywords

• Whispering gallery modes
• Optical resonators
• Microspheres
• Microbubbles
• Lasers
• Non-linear optics