Optical microcavities for engineering the light-matter interaction.

Optical microcavities are an important tool for photonics technologies, providing enhancement and control over the light-matter interaction that is not available in macroscopic devices. Here I will present recent work in fabricating miniature Fabry Perot style cavities that compare in specifications to state-of-the-art photonic crystal structures, but bring a number of additional benefits including full in-situ tunability and efficient coupling to external optics. I will describe some of our first experiments with these cavities, in the fields of optical sensing and controlling the fluorescence properties of single quantum dots and colour centres in diamond.