Photonic-Chip Supercontinuum with Tailored Spectra for Counting Optical Frequencies

Published

July 24, 2017

Author(s)

David R. Carlson, Daniel D. Hickstein, Alexander J. Lind, Judith B. Olson, Richard W. Fox, Roger C. Brown, Andrew D. Ludlow, Qing Li, Daron A. Westly, Tara M. Fortier, Kartik A. Srinivasan, Scott A. Diddams, Scott B. Papp

Abstract

Supercontinuum generation using chip-integrated photonic waveguides is a powerful approach for spectrally broadening pulsed laser sources with very low pulse energies and compact form factors. When pumped with a mode-locked laser frequency comb, these waveguides can coherently expand the comb spectrum to more than an octave in bandwidth to enable self-referenced stabilization. However, for applications in frequency metrology and precision spectroscopy, it is desirable to not only support self-referencing, but also to generate low-noise combs with tunable broadband spectra. In this work, we demonstrate dispersion-engineered waveguides based on silicon nitride that are designed to meet these goals and enable precision optical metrology experiments across large wavelength spans. We perform a clock comparison measurement and report a relative frequency instability of 3.8 × 10 − 15 at τ = 2 seconds between a 1550 nm cavity-stabilized reference laser and NIST's calcium atomic clock laser at 657 nm using a two-octave waveguide-supercontinuum comb.

Citation

Optica

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

integrated optics, metrology, nonlinear options, supercontinuum generation

Citation

Carlson, D. , Hickstein, D. , Lind, A. , Olson, J. , Fox, R. , Brown, R. , Ludlow, A. , Li, Q. , Westly, D. , Fortier, T. , Srinivasan, K. , Diddams, S. and Papp, S. (2017), Photonic-Chip Supercontinuum with Tailored Spectra for Counting Optical Frequencies, Optica (Accessed October 11, 2025)