Tunable Brillouin and Raman microlasers using hybrid microbottle resonators

Abstract

We realized a tunable Brillouin laser and a tunable Raman laser by using ultrahigh-quality-factor (Q) hybrid microbottle resonators. The whispering-gallery-mode microresonator-based Brillouin and Raman lasers possess unique advantages (e.g. low threshold, narrow line width, and flexible lasing wavelength region) and various potential applications. Efficient tuning of the Brillouin and Raman microresonator lasers is desirable in many cases. However, the corresponding lasing wavelength tunability is rarely reported. In this work, we realized the ultralow-threshold Brillouin and Raman lasers based on the proposed hybrid microbottle resonators with Q factors over 10⁸. Meanwhile, by feeding the control light through the axial direction of the hybrid microbottle resonators, a Brillouin lasing wavelength tuning range of 2.68 nm and a Raman lasing wavelength tuning range of 2.32 nm are realized, which are one order of magnitude and almost once larger than those reported in the previous works, respectively. Such tunable microlasers could find significant applications in light sources, microwave photonics, and optical sensing.