Diffraction-limited high-finesse optical cavities

High-quality optical cavities with wavelength-sized end mirrors are important to the growing field of micro-optomechanical systems. We present a versatile method for calculating the modes of diffraction limited optical cavities and show that it can be used to determine the effect of a wide variety of cavity geometries and imperfections. Additionally, we show these calculations agree remarkably well with FDTD simulations for wavelength-sized optical modes, even though our method is based on the paraxial approximation.