Ultrahigh-finesse optical cavities.
As the finesse of a Fabry-Perot optical cavity increases to about 20,000, the fringe width (approximately 10 kHz for a 50-cm cavity) is sufficiently narrow for transverse-mode splittings to be resolved by using a highly stabilized ring dye laser. A perturbative theory interprets this effect as a slight deviation of the cavity from cylindrical symmetry, the magnitude of the asymmetry being at the level of a few tenths of a nanometer. The understanding of these splittings will permit accurate optical frequency measurements by the recently proposed optical-radio-frequency divider.
Fabre
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IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120-6099, USA.
DeVoe
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Brewer
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