A widely tunable laser frequency offset lock with digital counting

Review of Scientific Instruments

Volumn 79, Issue 10, 2008, Pages

  Hughes, Joshua ^a   Fertig, Chad ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COOLING; DIGITAL ARITHMETIC; FREQUENCY ALLOCATION; LASER COOLING; LASERS;

ABSOLUTE OPTICAL FREQUENCIES; DIGITAL COUNTING; ELECTRONIC LOCKS; LASER COOLING AND TRAPPING; MASTER LASERS; SLAVE LASERS; TUNING RANGES; WIDE FREQUENCY RANGES; WIDELY TUNABLE LASERS;

FREQUENCY AGILITY;

EID: 55349128196     PISSN: 00346748     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1063/1.2999544     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (13)

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10. While the upper end of the capture range is straightforwardly set by the maximum operating frequency of the digital electronics, the lower end is (less obviously) set by the frequency at which the master and slave lasers cross (i.e., Δ obn changes sign), or at which fcount crosses Δ obn, whichever is higher. It is at this point that the "lock" becomes an "antilock" (i.e., the servoloop feedback becomes positive rather than negative).
11. For reasons that are not fully understood, our zero-crossing detector was fairly sensitive to input level, which was fine tuned to optimize performance.
12. We neglect issues related to the relative phases of the counted signal, the noise waveform and the sample clock; such considerations affect the results of this analysis at the fractional level of 1/MN, which is never greater than 1% for us.
13. The lock range is also (obviously) limited by the mode-hop free tuning range of the slave laser.