Thermal noise and radiation pressure in MEMS Fabry-Pérot tunable filters and lasers

Abstract

In this paper, we examine thermal noise and radiation-pressure effects in MEMS tunable Fabry-Pérot etalons. We show that thermal noise causes a jitter in the center wavelength in very high finesse etalons. In turn, the jitter causes an effective increase in the time-averaged filter bandwidth. Radiation pressure is of little consequence in conventional Fabry-Pérot etalons, but it can give rise to nonlinearities and hysteresis in the tuning response of high-finesse MEMS filters. We develop models of noise and optical nonlinearities and compare the models with a series of measurements on commercial tunable high-finesse MEMS Fabry-Pérot etalons.