Active stabilization of a diode laser injection lock

Saxberg, Brendan; Plotkin-Swing, Benjamin; Gupta, Subhadeep

doi:10.1063/1.4953589

Cited by 16 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Active stabilization relies on measuring the quality of the injection lock and adjusting the secondary diode laser parameters to maintain optimal injection locking. Injection locking can narrow the secondary laser's optical frequency spectrum 3 , reduce the intensity noise and frequency noise 4 , change the total output power 5 , and, as investigated in this work, change the polarization purity. Each of these parameters contains information about the quality of the injection lock and can be used in a feedback loop to maximize the quality of the lock.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Our injection locking system illustrated in Fig. 1 is very similar to those used by others 1,3,6 , with the addition of a single photodetector and feedback electronics. The primary laser is an external cavity diode laser (ECDL) with a laser diode (Nichia NDV4B16-E, free running wavelength of 400 nm) and a 3600 lines/mm grating separated by ≈3 cm.…”

Section: Apparatusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We note that any injection-lock quality measurement could be used with a microcontroller to stabilize the injection lock 3 (in contrast to an analog servo controller). Using the PER with a microcontroller would still allow much faster feedback, as the measurement rate is much higher than is achievable using a spectrometer.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Polarization purity for active stabilization of diode laser injection lock

Niederriter,

Van Der Put,

Hamilton

2021

Preprint

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Injection locking of diode lasers is commonly used to amplify low power laser light, but is extremely sensitive to perturbations in the laser current and temperature. To counter such perturbations, active stabilization is often applied to the current of the injection locked diode. We observe that the diode laser's polarization extinction ratio (PER) greatly increases when injection locked, and therefore the PER provides a measure of injection lock quality. We report robust active stabilization of a diode laser injection lock based on the PER, demonstrating the technique at 399 nm wavelength where injection locking is typically less stable than at longer wavelengths. The PER provides a feedback error signal that is compatible with standard PID servo controllers, requires no additional optical components beyond the optical isolator typically used in injection locking, and enables a large feedback bandwidth.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Apparatusmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Polarization purity for active stabilization of diode laser injection lock

Niederriter,

Van Der Put,

Hamilton

2021

Preprint

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“…An interesting and practical approach to circumvent such unlocking has been reported recently. 3 Alternatively, tapered amplifiers (TAs) can also be used to boost the available power. The power available from a TA depends on the wavelength, and is quite high at a few commonly-used wavelengths such as 850 nm.…”

Section: Pacs Numbers: Valid Pacs Appear Herementioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the injected power is not sufficient, obtaining such a single-mode output while tuning the frequency of the seed laser requires occasional minor re-tuning of the slave current to achieve matching of the slave cavity frequency to the injected frequency; this behavior is common in any injection locking system. 3 By operating with fairly high injection power, up to ∼50 mW, we were able to operate the slave laser in the locked condition over the entire range 970 nm -985 nm. We believe that this is a result of good mode-matching between the seed beam and the slave diode and low reflectivity of the laser diode at the chip facet.…”

Section: Pacs Numbers: Valid Pacs Appear Herementioning

confidence: 99%

Injection-locking of a fiber-pigtailed high-power laser to an external cavity diode laser via a fiber optic circulator

Shimasaki

Edwards

DeMille

2019

Review of Scientific Instruments

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We report a simple tunable master-slave laser injection-lock scheme for atomic physics experiments. Seed light from an external cavity diode laser is injected into a high-power fiber-pigtailed diode laser via a fiber optic circulator. High-power outputs (up to ∼600 mW) at the injected frequency have been obtained in a singlemode fiber with tuning over a wide wavelength range (∼15 nm). The scheme is simpler and more cost-effective than the traditional scheme of free-space injectionlocking. PACS numbers: Valid PACS appear hereTunable single frequency external cavity diode lasers (ECDLs) are widely used in atomic physics experiments. 1 Typically, 100 mW of output power can be obtained from an ECDL. When higher powers are required, master-slave setups based on injection-locking are frequently used to reach higher power output while maintaining the tuning and linewidth characteristics of the ECDL. In these systems, typically seed light from a master laser is coupled via free space into a slave laser, with the combination of a Faraday rotator and a polarizing beamsplitter acting to separate the amplified beam from the injected beam. 2 Such free-space injection-locking, however, is often susceptible to unlocking of the slave laser from the injected frequency. The success of the injection locking depends on the mode matching between the seed beam and the slave diode, on the in-coupled seed power, and on the matching between the seed frequency and the internal cavity resonance of the seed laser. Changes in the operating conditions over time can result in unreliable locking of the slave diode. An interesting and practical approach to circumvent such unlocking has been reported recently. 3 Alternatively, tapered amplifiers (TAs) can also be used to boost the available power. The power available from a TA depends on the wavelength, and is quite high at a few commonly-used wavelengths such as 850 nm. However, the range of wavelengths accessible with TAs is limited, their cost is substantial, and they often require free-space coupling as well. In addition, the beam quality obtained from a TA is often poor, leading to a low coupling efficiency of the TA output beam to a single-mode optical fiber.In this paper, we demonstrate a simple scheme to obtain moderate powers, up to 600 mW at 980 nm, of tunable single-frequency laser light directly in an optical fiber. Our scheme uses a fiber-pigtailed laser diode as a slave laser, injection-locked by a seed from an ECDL via a fiber optic circulator. Injection-locking via a fiber optic circulator has been demonstrated at 1550 nm previously. 4 However, this approach has not, to our knowledge, been used before in visible or near infrared wavelengths. Recently, it has become possible to obtain fiber optic circulators for shorter wavelengths, with specifications comparable to those for free-space isolators. By using a fiber optic circulator, we eliminate most of the free-space components involved in a typical injection locking setup, and hence reduce the alignment sensitivity. The only free-...

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