Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
Nat Commun. 2017 Oct 31;8(1):1209. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01303-y.
Low noise stable lasers have far-reaching applications in spectroscopy, communication, metrology and basic science. The Pound-Drever-Hall laser stabilization technique is widely used to stabilize different types of lasers in these areas. Here we report the demonstration of an integrated Pound-Drever-Hall system that can stabilize a low-cost laser to realize a compact inexpensive light source, which can ultimately impact many fields of science and engineering. We present an integrated architecture utilizing an electronically reconfigurable Mach-Zehnder interferometer as the frequency reference to reduce the frequency noise of semiconductor lasers by more than 25 dB and the relative Allan deviation by more than 12 times at 200 μs averaging time. Compared to the bench-top implementations, the integrated Pound-Drever-Hall system has significantly lower power consumption, less sensitivity to the environmental fluctuations and occupies an area of only 2.38 mm. The photonic and electronic devices are integrated on a standard 180 nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor silicon-on-insulator process.
低噪声稳定激光器在光谱学、通信、计量学和基础科学等领域有着广泛的应用。庞德-德雷弗-霍尔激光稳定技术被广泛用于稳定这些领域的不同类型的激光器。在这里，我们报告了一个集成的庞德-德雷弗-霍尔系统的演示，该系统可以稳定低成本的激光器，实现紧凑、廉价的光源，这最终将影响到科学和工程的许多领域。我们提出了一种利用可电子重构马赫-曾德尔干涉仪作为频率参考的集成架构，将半导体激光器的频率噪声降低超过 25dB，相对 Allan 偏差降低超过 12 倍，平均时间为 200μs。与台式实现相比，集成的庞德-德雷弗-霍尔系统具有更低的功耗、对环境波动的敏感度更低，并且占地面积仅为 2.38mm。光子和电子器件集成在标准的 180nm 互补金属氧化物半导体绝缘体上硅工艺上。
