Custom Cavity Fabrication Using Laser Ablation

In the past few decades, optical cavities have become a powerful tool to couple atoms over macroscopic distances via light, where a smaller waist of the light field enhances the coherent interactions required for quantum control. Generating a small waist, on the order of μm, combined with good stability of the resonator is enabled by an asymmetric design where the radius of curvature of one mirror is on the order of mm. Because such micromirrors are not commercially available, we employ a CO2 laser ablation setup to machine them, inspired by Refs. [1-2]. I will describe our setup, method of micromirror characterization, and planned use of such cavities. In the future, this setup will unlock additional custom mirror designs including arrays of micromirrors or aberration-corrected mirrors, in turn opening up more flexible cavity geometries such as degenerate cavities.