Some Fringe-broadening Defects in a Fabry-Perot Étalon

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Abstract
Three forms of defect in the surface finish or alignment of the plates of a Fabry-Perot étalon are considered, and tolerances are assessed where the étalon is used as the resonant chamber of an optical maser, and as a spectrometer of high resolving power. The defects are a regular polishing error of sinusoidal form, a random polishing error of gaussian distribution of amplitude and a small tilt error between otherwise perfect plates. It is shown that for both uses the plates have to be parallel to about a second of arc, and that if the amplitudes of the error functions are small compared to the wavelength of the emitted or incident radiation the regular sinusoidal function gives the greatest loss in efficiency. Asymmetric line profiles can be obtained if the error in the plates is not symmetrically distributed about the mean planes of the plates.

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