English

Fully-correlated pumping for dual-frequency VECSELs dedicated to cesium CPT clocks

Optics 2018-12-19 v1 Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

We report a fully-correlated multi-mode pumping architecture optimized for dramatic noise reduction of a class-A dual-frequency Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VECSEL). Thanks to amplitude division of a laser diode, the two orthogonally polarized modes emitted by the VECSEL oscillating at 852 nm are separately pumped by two beams exhibiting fully in--phase correlated intensity noises. This is shown to lead to very strong and in-phase correlations between the two lasing modes intensities. As a result, the phase noise power spectral density of the RF beat note generated by the two modes undergoes a drastic reduction of about 10 to 20 dB throughout the whole frequency range from 10 kHz to 20 MHz and falls below the detection floor above a few MHz. A good agreement is found with a model which uses the framework of rate equations coupled by cross--saturation. The remaining phase noise is attributed to thermal effects and additional technical noises and lies mainly within the bandwidth of a phase-locked-loop.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.03681,
  title  = {Fully-correlated pumping for dual-frequency VECSELs dedicated to cesium CPT clocks},
  author = {G. Gredat and D. Chatterjee and G. Baili and F. Gutty and I. Sagnes F. Goldfarb and F. Bretenaker and H. Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.03681},
  year   = {2018}
}