Configurable SNAP microresonators induced by axial pre-strain-assisted CO2 laser exposure

Opt Lett. 2024 Mar 1;49(5):1357-1360. doi: 10.1364/OL.516550.

Abstract

Flexible engineering of the complex shapes of the surface nanoscale axial photonics (SNAP) bottle microresonators (SBMs) is challenging for future nanophotonic technology applications. Here, we experimentally propose a powerful approach for the one-step fabrication of SBMs with simultaneous negative and positive radius variations, exhibiting a distinctive "bump-well-bump" profile. It is executed by utilizing two focused and symmetrical CO2 laser beams exposed on the fiber surface for only several hundred milliseconds. The spectral characteristics of different eigenmodes are analyzed, providing deep insights into the complex physical processes during the CO2 laser exposure. The shapes of the SBMs can be flexibly adjusted by the exposure time, laser power, and applied pre-strains. As a proof of this technique, the developed approach enables the efficient production of a bat SBM, ensuring a uniform field amplitude of the bat mode over the length exceeding 120 µm with 7% deviation. Our proposed technique provides a powerful technique for the efficient fabrication of SBMs with predetermined shapes, laying the groundwork for its applications on microscale optical signal processing, quantum computing, and so on.