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Nature Photonics 1, 139 (1 March 2007) | doi:10.1038/nphoton.2007.13

Microresonators: Optical doughnuts

Rachel Won

Portable tiny doughnut-shaped glass structures with exceedingly smooth surfaces and high Q-factors of around 30 million have now been made by scientists in California. The 'microtoroidal silica resonators' allow light to circulate around their outer ring with low loss and are potentially ideal for creating high-performance optical filters and exploring cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) (Opt.