We have experimentally demonstrated an on-chip all-silk fibroin whispering gallery mode microresonator by using a simple molding and solution-casting technique. The quality factors of the fabricated silk protein microresonators are up to 10^5. A high-sensitivity thermal sensor was realized in this silk fibroin microtoroid with sensitivity of 1.17 nm/K, 8 times higher than previous WGM resonator based thermal sensors. This opens the way to fabricate biodegradable and biocompatible protein based microresonators on a flexible chip for biophotonics applications.
We develop a compact whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) sensing system by integrating multiple components, including a tunable laser, a temperature controller, a function generator, an oscilloscope, a photodiode detector, and a testing computer, into a phone-sized embedded system. We demonstrate a thermal sensing experiment by using this portable system. Such a system successfully eliminates bulky measurement equipment required for characterizing optical resonators and will open up new avenues for practical sensing applications by using ultra-high Q WGM resonators.
Whispering gallery mode (WGM) microresonators, benefitting from the ultrahigh quality (Q) factors and small mode volumes, could considerably enhance the light-matter interaction, making it an ideal platform for studying a broad range of nonlinear optical effects. In this review, the progress of optical nonlinear effects in WGM microresonators is comprehensively summarized. First, several basic nonlinear effects in WGM microresonator are reviewed, including not only Pockels effect and Kerr effect, but also harmonic generations, four-wave mixing and stimulated optical scattering effects. Apart from that, nonlinearity induced by thermal effect and in PT-symmetric systems are also discussed. Furthermore, multistep nonlinear optical effects by cascading several nonlinear effects are reviewed, including frequency comb generations. Several selected applications of optical nonlinearity in WGM resonators are finally introduced, such as narrow-linewidth microlasers, nonlinearity induced non-reciprocity and frequency combs.
Highly prolate-shaped whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonators have recently attracted considerable attention due to their advantageous properties. We experimentally show that such resonators offer ultra-high quality factors, microscopic mode volumes, and near lossless in- and out-coupling of light using ultra-thin optical fibers. Additionally, bottle microresonators have a simple and customizable mode structure. This enables full tunability using mechanical strain and simultaneous coupling of two ultra-thin coupling fibers in an add-drop configuration. We present two applications based on these characteristics: In a cavity quantum electrodynamics experiment, we actively stabilize the frequency of the bottle microresonator to an atomic transition and operate it in an ultra-high vacuum environment in order to couple single laser-cooled atoms to the resonator mode. In a second experiment, we show that the bottle microresonator can be used as a low-loss, narrow-band add-drop filter. Using the Kerr effect of the silica resonator material, we furthermore demonstrate that this device can be used for single-wavelength all-optical signal processing.
We have demonstrated a 165 micron oblate spheroidal microcavity with free spectral range 383.7 GHz (3.06nm), resonance bandwidth 25 MHz (Q ~ 10^7) at 1550nm, and finesse F > 10^4. The highly oblate spheroidal dielectric microcavity combines very high Q-factor, typical of microspheres, with vastly reduced number of excited whispering-gallery (WG) modes (by two orders of magnitude). The very large free spectral range in the novel microcavity - few hundred instead of few GigaHertz in typical microspheres - is desirable for applications in spectral analysis, narrow-linewidth optical and RF oscillators, and cavity QED.
We report on the first experimental demonstration of terahertz (THz) whispering-gallery modes (WGMs) with an ultra high quality (Q) factor of $1.5 times {10}^{4}$ at 0.62THz. The WGMs are observed in a high resistivity float zone silicon (HRFZ-Si) spherical resonator coupled to a sub-wavelength silica waveguide. A detailed analysis of the coherent continuous wave (CW) THz spectroscopy measurements combined with a numerical model based on Mie-Debye-Aden-Kerker (MDAK) theory allows to unambiguously identify the observed higher order radial THz WGMs.