Arrays of open, independently tunable microcavities

Optical cavities are of central importance in numerous areas of physics, including precision measurement, cavity optomechanics and cavity quantum electrodynamics. The miniaturisation and scaling to large numbers of sites is of interest for many of these applications, in particular for quantum computation and simulation. Here we present the first scaled microcavity system which enables the creation of large numbers of highly uniform, tunable light-matter interfaces using ions, neutral atoms or solid-state qubits. The microcavities are created by means of silicon microfabrication, are coupled directly to optical fibres and can be independently tuned to the chosen frequency, paving the way for arbitrarily large networks of optical microcavities. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America