Micro Fabry-Pérot Interferometer at Rayleigh Range

The Fabry-Pérot interferometer is used in a variety of high-precision optical interferometry applications, such as gravitational wave detection. It is also used in various types of laser resonators to act as a narrow band filter. In addition, ultra-compact Fabry-Pérot interferometers are used in the optical resonators of semiconductor lasers and fiber-optic systems. In this work, we developed a micro-scale Fabry-Pérot interferometer that was constructed within the Rayleigh range of the optical focusing system. The high precision that is conventionally required for the optical parallelism and the surface accuracy of the mirrors was not so critical for this type of Fabry-Pérot interferometer. The interferometer was constructed using a gold-coated silicon microcantilever with reflectivity of 92% and a dielectric multilayer flat mirror with reflectivity of 85%. The focal spot size of the laser beam is 20 μm and the cavity length is approximately 20 μm. The finesse was measured to be approximately 25. The interferometric characteristics of the device were consistent with the theoretically calculated performance. The developed micro Fabry-Pérot interferometer has the potential to make a marked contribution to advances in optical measurements in various micro sensing system.