Kavli Affiliate: John E. Bowers
| First 5 Authors: Shixin Xue, Mingxiao Li, Raymond Lopez-rios, Jingwei Ling, Zhengdong Gao
| Summary:
The invention of the laser unleashed the potential of optical metrology,
leading to numerous advancements in modern science and technology. This
reliance on lasers, however, also sets a bottleneck for precision optical
metrology which is complicated by sophisticated photonic infrastructure
required for delicate laser-wave control, leading to limited metrology
performance and significant system complexity. Here we make a key step towards
resolving this challenge, by demonstrating a Pockels laser with
multi-functional capability that advances the optical metrology to a new level.
The chip-scale laser exhibits a narrow intrinsic linewidth down to 167 Hz and a
broad mode-hop-free tuning range up to 24 GHz. In particular, it offers an
unprecedented frequency chirping rate up to 20 EHz/s, and an enormous
modulation bandwidth >10 GHz, both orders of magnitude larger than any existing
lasers. With this laser, we are able to successfully achieve velocimetry of 40
m/s at a short distance of 0.4 m, with a measurable velocity up to the first
cosmic velocity at 1 m away, that is inaccessible by conventional ranging
approaches, and distance metrology with a ranging resolution of <2 cm.
Moreover, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, we are able to
realize a dramatically simplified architecture for laser frequency
stabilization, by direct locking the laser to an external reference gas cell
without any extra external light control. We successfully achieve a long-term
laser stability with a frequency fluctuation of only $pm$ 6.5 MHz over 60
minutes. The demonstrated Pockels laser combines elegantly high laser coherence
with ultrafast frequency reconfigurability and superior multifunctional
capability that we envision to have profound impacts on many areas including
communication, sensing, autonomous driving, quantum information processing, and
beyond.
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