Thermal-noise-limited optical cavity

Abstract

A pair of optical cavities are designed to be insensitive to both temperature fluctuations and mechanical vibrations. The fractional frequency stability of a laser locked to one of these cavities reaches a floor of 2 times 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-15</sup> for averaging times in the is attributed to range 0.5 s - 100 s. This limit Brownian motion of the mirrors.