Strain-based tunable optical microresonator with an in-fiber rectangular air bubble

Abstract

We demonstrate a strain-based fully tunable, near-lossless, whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonator made of an in-fiber rectangular air bubble, which is fabricated by splicing two segments of standard single-mode fibers. Such a resonator, with a 39 μm order radius and 1 μm order wall thickness, contributes to a high quality factor exceeding 106. The tuning in resonant wavelength is achieved by applying tensile strain to the resonator, and the voltage-tuning rate of the WGM resonance peaks is about 31.96 pm/V (strain-tuning rate ∼14.12 pm∕με), and the corresponding tuning accuracy is better than 0.03 pm. Since the tensile strain applied on the resonator can reach 1000 με, the achievable total tunable bandwidth of ∼14.12 nm is more than two times that of its azimuthal free spectral range.