Spherical and cylindrical dielectric cavities support high Q whispering gallery modes due to total internal reflection of the trapped light. When such a cavity is deformed smoothly the ray dynamics of these modes becomes chaotic in a manner determined by the KAM theory of classical hamiltonian dynamics. The universal properties of the ray dynamics predicted by KAM theory allow a general underst...

We report on investigations into the coherent properties of rare-earth ion doped whispering gallery mode resonators at low temperatures. Our experiments with Pr:Y2SiO5 enabled direct measurement of cavity QED parameters, showing good agreement with calculated values. We will also describe the a couple of our theoretical proposals we are working toward implementing experimentally. The up-convers...

We report on our recent results concerning fabrication of high-Q whispering gallery mode (WGM) crystalline resonators, and discuss some possible applications of lithium niobate WGM resonators in nonlinear optics and photonics. In particular, we demonstrate experimentally a tunable third-order optical filter fabricated from the three metalized resonators; and report observation of parametric fre...

We demonstrate a miniature self-injection locked distributed-feedback laser using resonant optical feedback from a high-Q crystalline whispering-gallery-mode resonator. The linewidth reduction factor is greater than 10,000, with resultant instantaneous linewidth of less than 200 Hz. The minimal value of the Allan deviation for the laser-frequency stability is 3 x 10(-12) at the integration time...

We report a technique to fabricate whispering gallery mode microdisk resonators using femtosecond laser micromachining and a heat reflow process to improve the optical quality of the resonator. The fabricated resonators had suppressed higher order modes with a measured Q-factor as high as 7.2× 10. The described fabrication process, which relies on material non-thermal laser ablation, offers the...