A light source for spectral hole burning applications

Summary form only given. Extended-cavity diode lasers with diffraction gratings have been well developed for atomic spectroscopy applications. Commercially available devices can be tuned over several nanometers without any mode hops allowing high-resolution spectroscopy. Tuning over large intervals usually involves motors for moving the grating. This well controlled movement is necessarily slow. Smaller scans, over several tens of GHz, can be achieved via piezoelectric mounts and can therefore be cycled at rates as high as several hundreds of Hz. However such fast scans suffer from hysteresis and lack of reproducibility. Spectroscopic applications usually do not ask for fast scans and the commercially available extended cavity diode laser systems fulfill their needs in most cases. Still extended cavity diode lasers can prove useful in other fields. The new design that we present allows very fast, highly linear and reproducible scans, without any mode hops, over several tens of GHz.