Osnabrück 2002 – scientific programme

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Q: Quantenoptik

Q 112: Optische Technik I

Q 112.2: Talk

Monday, March 4, 2002, 14:15–14:30, HS 22/108

A Multimode Waveguide - Interferometer — •Yuri Ovchinnikov and Tilman Pfau — Universitat Stuttgart, 5. Physikalisches Institut, Pfaffenwaldring 57, D-70550 Stuttgart

A new type of a light interferometer - a multimode waveguide-interferometer (MWI) is reported [1]. Compared to most of other interferometers, the MWI is based on the interference between several populated modes of a two-mirror optical resonator. An important intrinsic property of the MWI is its very high sensitivity to the distance between the mirrors. The fringe spacing of the MWI is inversely proportional to the number of reflections of light inside of the interferometer and thus can be much smaller than the wavelength of light. Experimentally, for the two gold mirror MWI with He-Ne laser light source, we have observed the fringe spacing about one nines of the light wavelength ( 70 nm), which was limited solely by the flatness of the mirrors used in the experiment. The prospects of building different integrated optical components based on the MWI are discussed. (1) Yuri B. Ovchinnikov and Tilman Pfau, Phys. Rev. Lett., v. 87, 123901 (2001).