Understanding and suppressing backscatter in optical resonators

Optical cavities have found widespread use in interfacing to quantum emitters. Concerns about backreflection and resulting loss, however, have largely prevented the placement of optics such as lenses or modulators within high-finesse cavities. In this work, we demonstrate a million-fold suppression of backreflections from lenses within a twisted optical cavity. We achieve this by quantitatively exploring backscatter in Fabry–Perot resonators, separating the effect into three physical sectors: polarization, mode envelope, and transverse mode profile. We describe the impact of each of these sectors and demonstrate how to minimize backreflections within each. This culminates in measured effective reflectivities below the part-per-billion level for the fundamental mode. Additionally, we show that beams carrying orbital angular momentum experience up to 10⁴ times additional suppression, limited only by the density of states of other cavity modes. The understanding and techniques described in this work could expand the utility of optical resonators in topics ranging from quantum optics and cavity quantum electrodynamics to ring resonators and laser gyroscopes.