Feedback-free optical cavity with self-resonating mechanism

We demonstrated the operation of a high finesse optical cavity without utilizing an active feedback system to stabilize the resonance. The effective finesse, which is a finesse including the overall system performance, of the cavity was measured to be 394 000 ± 10 000, and the laser power stored in the cavity was 2.52 ± 0.13 kW, which is approximately 187 000 times greater than the incident power to the cavity. The stored power was stabilized with a fluctuation of 1.7%, and we confirmed continuous cavity operation for more than two hours. This result has the potential to trigger an innovative evolution for applications that use optical resonant cavities such as compact photon sources with laser-Compton scattering or cavity enhanced absorption spectroscopy.