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A Fabry–Pérot etalon fixes mirror separation in a Fabry–Pérot interferometer, selecting wavelengths through its transmission resonances.^[ref]

A Fabry–Pérot interferometer uses repeated specular reflections between two nearly parallel, partially transmitting surfaces. Its transmitted light is the sum of contributions that have made zero, one, two, or more additional round trips. Their complex amplitudes reinforce only near particular wave phases, producing narrow transmission peaks that select wavelength intervals. Scanning the spacing or angle of incidence can build an imaging spectral cube: an image at each selected wavelength.

The surprising feature is that highly reflecting mirrors can together transmit all the incident power at resonance in the ideal symmetric, lossless model. Each individual contribution is weak, but many contributions arrive in phase. Between resonances the same contributions cancel strongly. Increasing mirror reflectivity sharpens the peaks instead of simply suppressing every transmitted signal; finesse quantifies that selectivity. An optical spectrum with nearby spectral lines can therefore produce distinguishable peaks, provided their separation is large enough relative to the instrument's peak width and their orders are identified.

Charles Fabry and Alfred Perot developed the instrument together; Optica dates its development from 1896 to 1898.^[ref]

The finesse of a Fabry–Pérot interferometer is its free spectral range divided by a transmission peak's full width at half maximum. Large finesse means a narrow accepted frequency interval compared with the spacing between repeated orders. Here half maximum means $T=1/2$ of the ideal unit peak, with zero detector background subtracted; it does not mean halfway between the transmission minimum and maximum.

Write $A=4R/(1-R{)}^2$ for the coefficient multiplying ${\sin }^2(\delta /2)$ in Fabry–Pérot transmission from multiple reflections. This coefficient is sometimes called the coefficient of finesse; it is not the finesse $\mathcal{F}$. About a resonance $\delta =2\pi m$, put $ϵ=\delta -2\pi m$. Solving $T=1/2$ givesand, since one free spectral range advances the wave phase by $2\pi$,These are exact for the ideal nondispersive model with constant $R$ and linear frequency dependence of $\delta$. The inverse sine requires $(1-R)/(2\sqrt{R})\le 1$, or $R\ge 3-2\sqrt{2}\simeq 0.171573$. At equality, neighbouring peaks merely touch half maximum at their shared minima: the nominal width is one full free spectral range and $\mathcal{F}=1$. Isolated half-maximum peaks require the strict inequality. Below this threshold the transmission never falls to $1/2$, so this peak-width definition supplies no finesse; at $R=0$ the transmission is flat.

For large reflectivity, the small-angle approximation $\arcsin x\simeq x$ givesThis is a high-reflectivity approximation, not an identity for every $R$. The original dimensionless examples below have exact full width at half maximum values obtained from the inverse sine formula.

The beauty of the narrowing is visible directly in the geometric series: large $R$ preserves contributions from many round trips, so a small phase difference accumulates across many terms and spoils their addition. For the stipulated $10\mathrm{mm}$ vacuum gap, $R=0.95$ gives an ideal full width at half maximum of about $244.792\mathrm{MHz}$. This instrumental width is not a measured spectral line width. A real scan also depends on the source profile, accepted angles, mirror shape, alignment, and scan stability. The University of Washington handout separately discusses mirror-reflectivity, mirror-flatness, and detector-pinhole contributions; increasing $R$ alone cannot remove the others.^[ref]

The free spectral range is the wavelength or frequency spacing between adjacent orders or resonances of an optical instrument. It identifies when different orders can overlap. Always specify the coordinate: a uniform spacing in frequency need not be uniform in wavelength. For an ideal Fabry–Pérot interferometer at normal incidence, with mirror separation $d$ and constant refractive index $n$, Fabry–Pérot resonance spacing gives $\Delta {\nu }_{\mathrm{FSR}}=c/(2nd)$, where $c$ is the speed of light in vacuum. The free spectral range of an echelle grating follows a different order condition.

Each LIGO instrument is a Michelson interferometer with approximately $4\mathrm{km}$ arms containing Fabry–Pérot interferometers. A stabilized $1064\mathrm{nm}$ laser illuminates suspended $40\mathrm{kg}$ fused-silica mirrors in vacuum. Four-stage suspensions and active isolation suppress ground motion; low-loss materials reduce thermal noise. Power recycling increases circulating power; signal recycling shapes the response to the gravitational wave.^[ref]

Why measure two perpendicular arms? In the long-wavelength limit, take a gravitational wave with plus polarization normally incident on ideal perpendicular arms. Its transverse-traceless tensor has $h_{xx}=h_{+}$ and $h_{yy}=-h_{+}$. Expanding each proper length to first order givesHere $h_{+}$ is dimensionless, whereas $\Delta L$ is a length. A stipulated $h_{+}=10^{-21}$ and $L=4000\mathrm{m}$ imply $\Delta L=4\times 10^{-18}\mathrm{m}$, with individual arm changes of opposite sign and magnitude $2\times 10^{-18}\mathrm{m}$. These are equivalent differential arm-length changes, not a photograph of mirrors moving against a rigid external ruler. The observable compares returning light phases; coordinate systems can distribute the description between mirror coordinates and light propagation.

For unit arm directions $\mathbf{u},\mathbf{v}$, define the detector tensor $D^{ij}=(u^i{u}^j-v^i{v}^j)/2$. If $e_{ij}^{+},e_{ij}^{\times }$ are the transverse polarization tensors, thenThe dimensionless factors $F_A$ encode sky direction and the polarization basis. Thus even identical sources can have different observed amplitudes and wave phases. Motion changing both arms equally cancels in this ideal differential observable, although real asymmetries can couple common disturbances into it.

Suspension supplies an inertial reference above its resonances. For example, a single ideal harmonic oscillator with support motion $y$ obeys $\ddot{x}+{\omega }_0^2(x-y)=0$. Its response at angular frequency $\omega$ is $x/y={\omega }_0^2/({\omega }_0^2-{\omega }^2)$, which decreases in magnitude as $({\omega }_0/\omega {)}^2$ well above resonance. The mirror follows slow support drift but approximately free motion in the high-frequency limit. Real multistage suspensions also require damping and alignment control; resonant frequencies are not regions of good isolation.

Rainer Weiss's 1972 report proposed suspended masses, multiple-pass optical delay lines, and a servo holding an interference fringe. Its noise analysis separately treats photon-counting fluctuations, laser frequency instability, mechanical thermal noise, radiation pressure and ground motion. Those delay lines should be distinguished from the resonant arm cavities of Advanced LIGO.^[ref]

A Michelson interferometer divides light at a beam splitter, reflects the two arms at mirrors and recombines the returning fields. For vacuum arm lengths ${\ell }_1,{\ell }_2$, the delay magnitude is $|\tau |=2|{\ell }_2-{\ell }_1|/c$. At each coarse delay, a small mirror scan produces maxima and minima of the detected light intensity. A photodiode and its electrical readout resolve these changes; the scan should cover several carrier cycles while changing $|g^{(1)}|$ negligibly. MIT's laboratory guide uses a mirror actuator, photodiode and electrical drive to scan interference fringes and extract interferometric visibility.^[ref]

A verified motivating experiment is Shaoul Ezekiel's MIT demonstration of source-spectrum control. A polarizer selects one or several lines from a laser whose adjacent lines have orthogonal linear polarizations. A sampled beam goes to a scanning Fabry–Pérot interferometer to check the optical spectrum; the main beam enters a Michelson interferometer, and a lens projects its interference fringes onto a screen. With one selected line the fringes retain good contrast through the demonstrated delay range. With several lines their contrast falls and returns as the arm length changes. At a fixed delay with poor contrast, selecting one line restores it; at matched arms both selections give good contrast. This control isolates the role of spectral composition rather than simply the arm position. The presentation is a qualitative demonstration, not a calibrated linewidth measurement. ^[ref].

A deliberately simpler two-line model explains the return of contrast. Take two stationary, mutually uncorrelated monochromatic contributions of equal power at ${\nu }_0\pm \delta \nu /2$. Their normalized wave-field correlation isfor equal detected single-arm light intensities. At $\tau =1/(2\delta \nu )$ the two contributions' interference fringes cancel on averaging; at $\tau =1/\delta \nu$ they agree again. This is a deduction from the stipulated spectrum, not a fit to Ezekiel's two- or three-line source. Finite individual linewidths eventually damp these revivals.

For a quantitative version of the experiment, the visibility law suggests explicit controls. Measure each arm separately at every coarse delay, subtract the detector's dark signal and any measured background, then normalize by $2\sqrt{I_1{I}_2}/(I_1+I_2)$. Keep the returning beams aligned on the same detector region with parallel linear polarizations; keep detector gain fixed and avoid saturation. Resolve the small mirror scan electrically, rather than averaging over its moving interference fringes. Repeat scans to identify vibration or drift. These controls follow from the averaging and mode-matching assumptions in first-order optical coherence; loss of contrast alone cannot distinguish source decorrelation from apparatus motion, misalignment or insufficient spatial resolution. The finite travel range gives access only to a finite range of delays.

The practical gain is that wave interference measures field correlations even when the detector cannot follow the optical oscillation itself. A long optical coherence length allows unequal-arm measurements; a short one localizes high contrast near matched delays. The beautiful feature is that both fading and reappearance of interference fringes are sums of the same rotating complex amplitudes.

The closest components above differ by $\Delta {\nu }_{\min }={\mu }_{B}B/(2h)\simeq 7.0\mathrm{GHz}{\mathrm{T}}^{-1}B$. At $B=0.1\mathrm{T}$, their separation is about $0.70\mathrm{GHz}$. A visible spectral line near $500\mathrm{nm}$ would consequently require spectral resolving power of order $\nu /\Delta {\nu }_{\min }\simeq 9\times 10^5$. An ordinary low-resolution spectrometer would merge the components.

A suitable arrangement places an excited low-pressure strontium discharge or a transversely observed atomic beam between wide electromagnet pole pieces. Collect the emission perpendicular to the magnetic field, select the desired spectral line with a prefilter or monochromator, and send it through a high-finesse scanning Fabry–Pérot interferometer to a detector. A rotatable linear polarizer separates the two $\pi$ components from the four $\sigma$ components. Calibrate both the interferometer's free spectral range and the local magnetic field; take zero-field and several field-strength scans, and fit component positions against $B$.

The magnetic field should be uniform across the viewed volume, with its associated Zeeman splitting larger than the combined natural linewidth, Doppler broadening, pressure broadening and instrumental width, but much smaller than the separations of the relevant atomic fine-structure levels. A collimated transverse atomic beam, low collision rate and restricted collection angle reduce unwanted spectral line broadening. Avoid appreciable power broadening, resolve or model isotope and hyperfine structure, and check for self-absorption. A zero-field scan and the predicted linear scaling help distinguish actual Zeeman splitting components from neighbouring spectral lines.

Let $\mathcal{R}=|r{|}^2$ be the single-mirror power reflectivity and ${\theta }_g$ the propagation angle inside the gas. Define $\lambda$ as the vacuum wavelength. Successive transmitted complex amplitudes differ by a round-trip factor $\mathcal{R}{e}^{i\delta }$, where, for real dielectric reflection coefficients whose product has positive sign,The cosine arises by comparing successive emerging rays on the same outgoing wavefront; it is not the literal zigzag distance $2d/\cos {\theta }_g$. Equivalently, the round-trip phase is $2k_{z}d$. If the source's $\theta$ is the angle in external air, Snell's law gives $n\sin {\theta }_g=\sin \theta$ andIf $\theta$ denotes the internal angle, simply set ${\theta }_g=\theta$.

For identical lossless mirrors, their power transmission is $1-\mathcal{R}$. In an energy-normalized amplitude convention this is $|t{|}^2=1-\mathcal{R}$; more general interface amplitudes require the corresponding wave impedance factors. The geometric series of transmitted amplitudes givesHenceThis is Fabry–Pérot transmission from multiple reflections.^[ref]

At normal incidence, for nondispersive $n$ and zero net reflection phase modulo $2\pi$, the resonance condition is $\delta =2\pi m$. The resonance frequencies and free spectral range areFor finite $\mathcal{R}<1$ the resonances have finite width, and transmission away from them is nonzero. Thus “only discrete frequencies” is an ideal high-reflectivity description of the selected resonances, not an exact statement about the support of the transmitted spectrum. For example, $\mathcal{R}=0.9$ at $\delta =\pi$ still gives $I_t/I_0=(0.1/1.9{)}^2\simeq 0.00277$.

At half the unit peak, $Q{\sin }^2(\delta /2)=1$. Measuring the phase displacement from a resonance yieldsThe last expression is the high-reflectivity approximation, with finesse $\pi \sqrt{\mathcal{R}}/(1-\mathcal{R})$. At $\mathcal{R}=0.9$, the full phase width is about $0.2109$ radians and $\Delta {\nu }_{\mathrm{FWHM}}/\Delta {\nu }_{\mathrm{FSR}}\simeq 0.03357$. At $\mathcal{R}=0.1$, the minimum transmission is $0.6694$, so the trace never reaches half the peak and this full width at half maximum is not defined. The exact half-maximum condition requires $\mathcal{R}\ge 3-2\sqrt{2}$.

For the absorbing Fabry–Pérot mirror phase and transmission, write $r=\sqrt{\mathcal{R}}{e}^{i{\varphi }_r}$ and let $\mathcal{T}$ be the power transmission of one mirror. Optical absorption makes $\mathcal{R}+\mathcal{T}<1$. The transmitted intensity becomesHere the phase formula is at normal incidence. The peak is reduced below unity, while a change in $\mathcal{R}$ changes the width. The complex reflection phase also moves the resonances: if ${\varphi }_r$ is approximately constant,If either $n$ or ${\varphi }_r$ depends on frequency, this is an implicit condition and the free spectral range need not be constant. No numerical shift is determined without the mirrors' optical response.

An integral field spectrograph obtains spectra throughout a two-dimensional field instead of along one slit alone. Its reduced spectral data cube is $I(x,y,\lambda )$: two coordinates locate a spatial sampling element and the third labels wavelength. One slice at fixed wavelength is an image; one column at fixed spatial position is an optical spectrum. The third axis is spectral, not a third spatial direction.

Six ways to obtain such a cube illustrate the distinction between field reformatting and scanning:

The first four are simultaneous spatially multiplexed grating arrangements. The last two deliver equivalent cube coordinates by scanning; they are imaging spectrometers rather than simultaneous grating integral-field units, and variability during the scan can corrupt the cube. Detector packing, sampling, calibration and throughput determine the practical tradeoffs.

One instrument is a diffraction grating spectrometer. Its principal maxima satisfy $d\sin \theta =m\lambda$ at normal incidence. N coherently illuminated grooves give a narrow principal peak; applying the Rayleigh criterion to the next wavelength yields the resolving power of a diffraction gratingHigher order and more illuminated grooves improve resolution, but finite entrance-slit width, aberrations, detector sampling and overlap between spectral orders limit useful resolution. Angular dispersion $d\theta /d\lambda =m/(d\cos \theta )$ is distinct from the ability to resolve two finite-width peaks.

A second instrument is a Fabry–Pérot interferometer. For plate spacing L, refractive index n and internal angle theta, transmission resonances satisfy $2nL\cos \theta =m\lambda$. Multiple coherent reflections produce an Airy transmission profile. For identical lossless mirrors of intensity reflectivity $\mathcal{R}$, the high-finesse limit givesThe frequency free spectral range is approximately $c/(2nL\cos \theta )$ for nondispersive n. A larger optical spacing narrows a line but also shrinks the unambiguous frequency interval; nearby orders need sorting. Mirror flatness, absorption, alignment and aperture broadening lower the effective finesse. This resolving-power formula assumes separated narrow lines and a stated line-separation convention, rather than equating transmission peak spacing with peak width.

Two parallel partially reflecting surfaces in a Fabry–Pérot interferometer produce a sequence of coherent transmitted beams. For equal lossless mirror intensity reflectance $\mathcal{R}$ and round-trip phase $\delta =4\pi nd\cos {\theta }_t/\lambda$, summing the geometric series of amplitudes givesresonances have $2nd\cos {\theta }_t=m\lambda$ and unit peak transmission in this symmetric lossless model. Varying angle gives concentric equal-inclination rings; changing spacing scans the resonance wavelengths.

At normal incidence with negligible dispersion, the free spectral range is $\Delta {\nu }_{\mathrm{FSR}}=c/(2nd)$. For high reflectance, the peak full width gives finesse and resolving powerThe coefficient $\mathcal{F}$ in the transmission formula and the finesse $\mathcal{F}$ are different quantities. Multiple round trips sharpen a peak, allowing high-resolution spectroscopy, frequency selection and cavity measurements. Absorption, mirror mismatch, finite angular spread, imperfect parallelism and surface errors reduce usable transmission or finesse. Adjacent orders can overlap in a broadband measurement, requiring order selection or prior spectral information.

Compare a directly transmitted ray emerging at $A$ with a ray that makes one extra round trip inside the Fabry–Pérot interferometer and emerges at $C$. Both emerge parallel at angle $\theta$ to the plate normal. The extra internal distance is $2d/\cos \theta$, and their emergence points differ laterally by $AC=2d\tan \theta$. The first ray has already travelled $AC\sin \theta$ towards a common outgoing wavefront when the second reaches $C$. The air-gap optical path difference in a Fabry–Pérot interferometer follows because optical path length equals geometric path length in the air-gap approximation:The subtraction is essential: comparing distances only inside the plates would compare different outgoing wavefronts. The corresponding propagation phase difference is $2\pi \Delta /\lambda$. Coating reflection phases can add a separate phase offset; they do not change this geometric optical path difference.

In the published chlorine experiment, negative ions were accelerated and mass-selected, then overlapped with a tunable laser beam. A downstream electric field deflected charged ions; neutral chemical atoms continued to a plate, whose secondary electrons were counted. Scanning the laser frequency produced an onset in this neutral-atom signal. The apparatus therefore inferred an electron affinity from a threshold, rather than measuring the heat of attachment.^[ref]

Reversing the laser direction and averaging the two thresholds corrected the first-order Doppler shift. A Fabry–Pérot interferometer and reference spectral lines calibrated the frequency. Finite laser bandwidth, unresolved quantum state splitting and shifts of the calibration lines limited the inference; the authors included these effects in fitting and the error estimate. The level diagram shows only the extracted gap, not a measured signal curve.^[ref]