Compact, thermal-noise-limited reference cavity for ultra-low-noise microwave generation

We demonstrate an easy-to-manufacture 25-mm-long ultra-stable optical reference cavity for transportable photonic microwave generation systems. Employing a rigid holding geometry that is first-order insensitive to the squeezing force and a cavity geometry that improves the thermal noise limit at room temperature, we observe a laser phase noise that is nearly thermal noise limited for three frequency decades (1 Hz to 1 kHz offset) and supports 10 GHz generation with phase noise near −100 dBc/Hz at 1 Hz offset and <−173 dBc/Hz for all offsets >600 Hz. The fractional frequency stability reaches 2×10−15 at 0.1 s of averaging.