ANALYTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF RINGING EFFECTS IN A FABRY-PEROTCAVITY - APPLICATION TO THE MEASUREMENT OF HIGH FINESSES

The phenomenon of ringing in swept Fabry-Perot cavities, which leads t o discrepancies with respect to usual Airy peaks, exhibits three diffe rent regimes, depending on the values of the finesse, the sweep freque ncy, and the free spectral range of the cavity. In particular, the int ermediate case in which the Fabry-Perot cavity transmission essentiall y oscillates is shown theoretically and experimentally to provide a ne w simple method to measure the finesse of the cavity. For cavities wit h intermediate finesses (F approximate to 10 000) this method is exper imentally shown to have a precision of the order of 1%. (C) 1997 Optic al Society of America.