Optical Frequency Conversion in Silica-Whispering-Gallery-Mode Microspherical Resonators

Abstract

High quality factor whispering-gallery-mode microresonators are ideally suited for nonlinear optical interactions. We analyze, experimentally and theoretically, a variety of ${\chi }^{(3)}$ nonlinear interactions in silica microspheres, consisting of third harmonic generation and Raman assisted third order sum-frequency generation in the visible. A tunable, room temperature, cw multicolor emission in silica microspherical whispering-gallery-mode microresonators has been achieved by controlling the cavity mode dispersion and exciting nonequatorial modes for efficient frequency conversion. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.093901 Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Published by the American Physical Society