Ultrastable high-spectral-purity lasers have served as the cornerstone behind optical atomic clocks, quantum measurements, precision optical microwave generation, high-resolution optical spectroscopy, and sensing. Hertz-level lasers stabilized to high-finesse Fabry-Pérot cavities are typically used for these studies, which are large and fragile and remain laboratory instruments. There is a clear demand for rugged miniaturized lasers with stabilities comparable to those of bulk lasers. Over the past decade, ultrahigh-Q optical whispering-gallery-mode resonators have served as a platform for low-noise microlasers but have not yet reached the stabilities defined by their fundamental noise. Here, we show the noise characteristics of whispering-gallery-mode resonators and demonstrate a resonator-stabilized laser at this limit by compensating the intrinsic thermal expansion, allowing a sub-25 Hz linewidth and a 32 Hz Allan deviation. We also reveal the environmental sensitivities of the resonator at the thermodynamical noise limit and long-term frequency drifts governed by random-walk-noise statistics.

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A novel optical method has been developed for the measurement of thermal accommodation coefficients in the temperature-jump regime. The temperature dependence of the resonant frequency of a fused-silica microresonator's whispering-gallery mode is used to measure the rate at which the microresonator comes into thermal equilibrium with the ambient gas. The thermal relaxation time is related to the thermal conductivity of the gas under some simplifying assumptions and measuring this time as a function of gas pressure determines the thermal accommodation coefficient. Using a low-power tunable diode laser of wavelength around 1570 nm to probe a microsphere's whispering-gallery mode through tapered-fiber coupling, we have measured the accommodation coefficients of air, helium, and nitrogen on fused silica at room temperature. In addition, by applying thin-film coatings to the microsphere's surface, we have demonstrated that accommodation coefficients can be measured for various gases on a wide range of modified surfaces using this method.

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We report an optical method for measuring the thickness of the water layer adsorbed onto the surface of a high-Q fused-silica microresonator. Light from a tunable diode laser operating near 1550 nm is coupled into the microresonator to excite whispering-gallery modes (WGMs). By observing thermal distortion or even bistability of the WGM resonances caused by absorption in the water layer, the contribution of that absorption to the total loss is determined. Thereby, the thickness of the water layer is found to be ∼0.1 nm (approximately one monolayer). This method is further extended to measure the desorption rate of the adsorbed water, which is roughly exponential with a decay time of ∼40 h when the fused-silica microresonator is held in a vacuum chamber at low pressure.