Wide tunable laser with noise suppression for precise cavity length measurement

Author

Smid, Radek ; Cizek, Martin ; Mikel, Bretislav ; Hrabina, Jan ; Lazar, Josef ; Cip, Ondrej

Author_Institution

Inst. of Sci. Instrum., Brno, Czech Republic

fYear

2014

fDate

24-29 Aug. 2014

Firstpage

604

Lastpage

605

Abstract

We present a method to measure precisely absolute distance between mirrors of Fabry-Perot cavity (FPC) with a spacer from an ultra low expansion material based on ultra wide tunable laser diode. The laser diode works at 1542 nm with 1 MHz linewidth and 2 nm tunable range. First results with noise suppression was carried out with 3 kHz linewidth laser has been suppressed by -60 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz by unbalanced heterodyne fiber interferometer while the tunability range stayed untouched. This way we were able to reach 10^-10 uncertainty corresponding to 10 fm with wide tunable range of 100s of GHz corresponding to 1000 nm distance changes. The precision is ensured by referencing to stabilized optical frequency comb.

Keywords

Fabry-Perot interferometers; distributed feedback lasers; heterodyne detection; laser cavity resonators; laser mirrors; length measurement; semiconductor lasers; Fabry-Perot cavity; frequency 1 MHz; frequency 10 kHz; noise suppression; optical frequency comb; precise cavity length measurement; time 100 s; ultrawide tunable laser diode; unbalanced heterodyne fiber interferometer; wavelength 1542 nm; Cavity resonators; Fiber lasers; Laser noise; Measurement by laser beam; Optical interferometry; Semiconductor lasers; Fabry-Perot cavity; Fiber Interferometer; Noise supression; optical frequency comb;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Precision Electromagnetic Measurements (CPEM 2014), 2014 Conference on

Conference_Location

Rio de Janeiro

ISSN

0589-1485

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-5205-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CPEM.2014.6898530

Filename

6898530