Cavity enhanced interference of orthogonal modes in a birefringent medium

Abstract Interference of orthogonal modes in a birefringent crystal mediated by a rotator is known to lead to interesting physical effects (Solli et al., 2003). In this paper we show that additional feedback offered by a Fabry–Perot cavity (containing the birefringent crystal and the rotator) can lead to a novel strong interaction regime. Usual signatures of the strong interaction regime like the normal mode splitting and avoided crossings, sensitive to the rotator orientation, are reported. A high finesse cavity is shown to offer an optical setup for measuring small angles. The results are based on direct calculations of the cavity transmissions along with an analysis of its dispersion relation.