Locking Multi-Laser Frequencies to a Precision Wavelength Meter: Application to Cold Atoms

Mode locking of a wavelength-swept laser.

Self-starting, stable mode-locked pulses can be generated from a wavelength-swept laser through the interplay between an intracavity scanning filter and self-phase modulation. From an Er3+-doped fiber laser employing a scanning Fabry-Perot filter, 100 ps optical pulses are obtained at a 12-MHz repetition rate with center wavelengths that are swept over 27 nm around 1.55 microm in 1 ms.

Towards a random laser with cold atoms

Atoms can scatter light and they can also amplify it by stimulated emission. From this simple starting point, we examine the possibility of realizing a random laser in a cloud of laser-cooled atoms. The answer is not obvious as both processes (elastic scattering and stimulated emission) seem to exclude one another: pumping atoms to make them behave as an amplifier reduces drastically their scat...

Frequency stability of a wavelength meter and applications to laser frequency stabilization.

Interferometric wavelength meters have attained frequency resolutions down to the megahertz range. In particular, Fizeau interferometers, which have no moving parts, are becoming a popular tool for laser characterization and stabilization. In this paper, we characterize such a wavelength meter using an ultrastable laser in terms of relative frequency instability σ(y)(τ) and demonstrate that it ...

Multi-wavelength Laser Photoacoustics

Cold electron sources using laser-cooled atoms

Since the first observation of electron diffraction in 1927, electrons have been used to probe the structure of matter. High-brightness sources of thermal electrons have recently emerged that are capable of simultaneously providing high spatial resolving power along with ultrafast temporal resolution, however they are yet to demonstrate the holy grail of singleshot diffraction of non-crystallin...