Micro-mechanical assembly and characterization of high-quality Fabry–Pérot microcavities for the integration of two-dimensional materials

Integrating monolayers of two-dimensional semiconductors into optical microcavities is challenging because of the very few available approaches to coat the monolayers with dielectric materials without damaging them. Some strategies have been developed, but they either rely on complicated experimental settings and expensive technologies or limit the achievable cavity quality factors. Thus, high quality Fabry–Perot microcavities are not widely available to the community focusing on light-matter coupling in atomically thin materials. Here, we detail a recently developed technique to micro-mechanically assemble Fabry–Perot microcavities. Our approach promotes strong coupling conditions with excitons in atomically thin materials, it does not rely on difficult or expensive technologies, it is reproducible, and it yields microcavities with quality factors approaching 4000. It is ideally suitable for engineering coupled monolayer-cavity systems of advanced complexity in small-scale laboratories.