Fabrication and analysis of a Fabry-Perot cavity with a micromechanical wet-etching process

Min Xiang; Yan Min Cai; Ya Ming Wu; Jian Yi Yang; Yue Lin Wang

doi:10.1364/ao.43.003258

Fabrication and analysis of a Fabry-Perot cavity with a micromechanical wet-etching process

Appl Opt. 2004 Jun 1;43(16):3258-62. doi: 10.1364/ao.43.003258.

Authors

Min Xiang¹, Yan Min Cai, Ya Ming Wu, Jian Yi Yang, Yue Lin Wang

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratories of Transducer Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 865 Changning Road, Shanghai 200050, China. mxiang@mail.sim.ac.cn

PMID: 15181805
DOI: 10.1364/ao.43.003258

Abstract

We present a novel low-cost and batch fabrication method to fabricate a Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity with a micromechanical wet-etching process, through which FP cavities can be achieved with a cavity length of from several micrometers to tens of micrometers. The parallelism of mirror elements can be well achieved without electrostatic control. The quality of an etched surface can be greatly improved by the oxidation polish process. FP cavities with a finesse of approximately 50 are achieved. Analysis shows that the effective finesse is dominated mainly by the quality of the etched surface.