High contrast gratings for high-precision metrology

Experiments in the field of high-precision optical metrology are crucially limited by thermal noise of the optical components such as mirrors or beam splitters. Amorphous coatings stacks are found to be a main source for these thermal fluctuations. In this contribution we present approaches to realize coating free optical components based on resonant high contrast gratings (HCGs) made of crystalline silicon. It is shown that beside classical cavity mirrors the concept of HCGs can also be used for reflective cavity couplers. We compare the advantages and challenges of these HCG reflectors with distributed Bragg reflectors made of crystalline coatings for applications in optical metrology.

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