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Abstract

We demonstrate the optical coupling of two cavities without light
transmission through a substrate. Compared to a conventional coupling
component, that is a partially transmissive mirror, an all-reflective coupler
avoids light absorption in the substrate and therefore associated thermal
problems, and even allows the use of opaque materials with possibly favourable
mechanical and thermal properties. Recently, the all-reflective coupling of two
cavities with a low-efficiency 3-port diffraction grating was theoretically
investigated. Such a grating has an additional (a third) port. However, it was
shown that the additional port does not necessarily decrease the bandwidth of
the coupled cavities. Such an all-reflective scheme for cavity coupling is of
interest in the field of gravitational wave detection. In such detectors light
that is resonantly enhanced inside the so-called power-recycling cavity is
coupled to (kilometre-scale) Fabry-Perot resonators representing the arms of a
Michelson interferometer. In order to achieve a high sensitivity over a broad
spectrum, the Fabry-Perot resonators need to have a high bandwidth for a given
(high) power build-up. We realized such an all-reflective coupling in a
table-top experiment. Our findings are in full agreement with the theoretical
model incorporating the characteristics of the 3-port grating used, and
therefore encourage the application of all-reflective cavity couplers in future
gravitational wave detectors.