Critical coupling control of a microresonator by laser amplitude modulation

Abstract

We present a laser amplitude modulation technique to actively stabilize the critical coupling of a microresonator by controlling the evanescent coupling gap from an optical fiber taper. It is a form of nulled lock-in detection, which decouples laser intensity fluctuations from the critical coupling measurement. We achieved a stabilization bandwidth of ∼ 20 Hz, with up to 5 orders of magnitude displacement noise suppression at 10 mHz, and an inferred gap stability of better than a picometer/√Hz.