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Researchers have developed an optical Fabry-Perot cavity that combines both frequency stability and tunability, two features that previously required separate systems. The cavity uses piezoelectric tuning and achieves thermal expansion cancellation at approximately 5°C, resulting in fractional frequency instabilities of 4×10^-13 at 1 second integration time. This design eliminates the need for external active feedback systems that were previously required to maintain cavity stability in atom-light interaction experiments.
Why it matters
This advancement simplifies experimental setups for precision metrology and atomic physics research by removing the need for complex external stabilization systems. The design has immediate applications in ultra-stable superradiant lasers and cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments, potentially making these technologies more practical and accessible.
arXiv:2603.11817v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Optical Fabry-Perot cavities are crucial tools for metrology experiments, where they achieve extreme length stability, and for some atomic physics experiments, where tunability to atomic transitions enables atom-light interactions. However, achieving both frequency stability and tunability in a single cavity has remained a challenge, forcing metrology experiments exploiting atom-cavity interactions to rely on external active feedback systems to stabilize the length of the cavity. Here, we describe a piezoelectrically-tunable cavity with a cancellation of the coefficient of thermal expansion at around $5^circmathrm{C}$, achieving fractional frequency instabilities at the $4times 10^{-13}$ level for 1~s integration time. This advance eliminates the need for external stabilization in many atom-cavity experiments, making this design ideal for applications such as ultra-stable superradiant lasers and other cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments.
Source: Temperature-insensitive tunable and stable Fabry-Perot cavity for atomic physics