Fabrication of High-Q Microresonators by Femtosecond Laser Micromachining of Optical Fiber

We report a technique to fabricate whispering gallery mode microdisk resonators using femtosecond laser micromachining and a heat reflow process to improve the optical quality of the resonator. The fabricated resonators had suppressed higher order modes with a measured Q-factor as high as 7.2× 10. The described fabrication process, which relies on material non-thermal laser ablation, offers the ability to fabricate microresonators using a wide variety of materials of nearly any dimensional size or shape.