This paper describes the theory of a microfiber loop resonator (MLR) and experimentally demonstrates a high quality factor MLR in free space. The MLR is fabricated from the /spl sim/1-/spl mu/m diameter waist of a biconical fiber taper using the CO/sub 2/ laser indirect heating technique. The high coupling efficiency of an MLR is achieved through an adiabatically slow variation of the microfiber diameter in the coupling region. An MLR-loaded Q-factor of 120 000 and an intrinsic Q-factor of 630 000 were demonstrated. As an application, the performance of an MLR as an ultrafast direct contact temperature sensor is also demonstrated. The MLR heating/cooling relaxation time was measured to be /spl sim/3 /spl mu/s, in good agreement with the developed theory.

We develop a method for fabricating very small silica microbubbles having a micrometer-order wall thickness and demonstrate the first optical microbubble resonator. Our method is based on blowing a microbubble using stable radiative $\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{O}}_2$ laser heating rather than unstable convective heating in a flame or furnace. Microbubbles are created along a microcapillary and are naturally opened to the input and output microfluidic or gas channels. The demonstrated microbubble resonator has $370\mu \mathrm{m}$ diameter, $2\mu \mathrm{m}$ wall thickness, and a Q factor exceeding ${10}^6$.

In a tapered optical fiber there exist localized light structures that, in analogy to the magnetic bottles used in plasma fusion, can be called whispering-gallery bottles (WGBs). These essentially three-dimensional structures are formed by the spiral rays that experience total internal reflection at the fiber surface and that also bounce along the fiber axis in response to reflection from the regions of tapering. It is shown that the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin quantization rules for the strongly prolate WGBs can be inversed exactly, thus determining the cavity shape from its spectrum. The approximation considered allows one to find the shape of the etalon bottle, which, similar to the one-dimensional Fabry–Perot etalon, contains an unlimited number of equally spaced wave-number eigenvalues. The problem of determining such a non-one-dimensional cavity is not trivial, because such a cavity does not exist among the uniformly filled cavities such as rectangular boxes, cylinders, and spheroids that allow separation of variables. The etalon cavity corresponds to the fiber radius variation $\rho \left(z\right)={\rho }_0\left|cos\left(\mathrm{\Delta }\mathit{kz}\right)\right|$, where $\mathrm{\Delta }k$ is the wave-number spacing. The latter result is in excellent agreement with ray-dynamics numerical modeling.

The optical microfiber coil resonator with self-coupling turns is suggested and investigated theoretically. This type of a microresonator has a three-dimensional geometry and complements the well-known Fabry-Perot (one-dimensional geometry, standing wave) and ring (two-dimensional geometry, traveling wave) types of microresonators. The coupled wave equations for the light propagation along the adiabatically bent coiled microfiber are derived. The particular cases of a microcoil having two and three turns are considered. The effect of microfiber radius variation on the value of Q-factor of resonances is studied.

We fabricated nanometer- and micrometer-order diameter optical fibers (NMOFs) by drawing them in a microfurnace comprising a sapphire tube heated with a CO₂ laser. Using very short - a few mm long - fiber biconical tapers having a submicron waist, which can be bent locally in a free space by translation of the taper ends, we studied the effect of bending and looping on the transmission characteristics of a free NMOF. In particular, we have demonstrated an optical interferometer built of a coiled self-coupling NMOF.

We experimentally demonstrate an optical microfiber loop resonator. The resonator was formed in free space by creating a loop from the subwavelength-diameter waist of a short biconical optical fiber taper. The loop length was chosen so that the free spectrum range of the resonator was ∼100GHz at the optical communication wavelengths near 1.5μm. In order to change and optimize the spectral characteristics such as the effect of birefringence, the shape of resonances, and the free spectrum range, we manually varied the microfiber self-coupling by alignment of the input and output ends of the loop, which were attached to each other by Van der Waals and electrostatic forces. In particular, we tuned the microfiber loop resonator to exhibit resonances with a Q-factor exceeding 15 000 (finesse ≈10) and, also, to the regime of critical coupling with the extinction ratio of transmission oscillations exceeding 34dB. This paper was in press when we achieved the values of 95 000 and 630 000 for the loaded and intrinsic Q-factor, respectively (see note added in proof). We believe that the demonstrated Q-factor can be significantly enhanced with the more uniform microfiber.