We demonstrate that the stability of the current optical frequency comb generated by a Kerr-lens mode-locked femtosecond laser is limited by the microwave reference used for phase locking the comb spacing. Hence we implement precision frequency/phase control of the entire comb to the fundamental and second-harmonic frequencies of a stable cw laser without any external microwave reference. The s...

The need for highly performing and stable methods for mid-IR molecular sensing and metrology pushes towards the development of more and more compact and robust systems. Among the innovative solutions aimed at answering the need for stable mid-IR references are crystalline microresonators, which have recently shown excellent capabilities for frequency stabilization and linewidth narrowing of qua...

Long-term stability of a laser system is crucially important for applications such as ultrafast laser spectroscopy. Unfortunately, this topic received little attention in novel pulse compression schemes. Through the ultra-stable beam pointing of the 50 kHz laser system, the long-term stability of nonlinear pulse compression (NPC) was measured for up to 17 hours at different peak powers in a fib...

A fundamental limit to the stability of a single-ion optical frequency standard is set by quantum noise in the measurement of the internal state of the ion. We discuss how the interrogation sequence and the processing of the atomic resonance signal can be optimized in order to obtain the highest possible stability under realistic experimental conditions. A servo algorithm is presented that stab...

A novel quartz enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) trace gas detection scheme is reported in this paper. A cylindrical lens was employed for near-infrared laser focusing. The laser beam was shaped as a planar line laser between the gap of the quartz tuning fork (QTF) prongs. Compared with a spherical lens-based QEPAS sensor, the cylindrical lens-based QEPAS sensor has the advantages of ...

A simple analog locking circuit was shown to stabilize the beat signal between a 2.408 THz quantum cascade laser and a CH(2)DOH THz CO(2) optically pumped molecular laser to 3-4 kHz (FWHM). This is approximately a tenth of the observed long-term (t approximately sec) linewidth of the optically pumped laser showing that the feedback loop corrects for much of the mechanical and acoustic-induced f...

A multiple-trap single-beam scanning laser tweezer system was developed and characterized. Different stationary and mobile multiple-trap modes were generated for polystyrene beads in a water environment. Trapping efficiency and stability were investigated for several dynamic parameters such as transition time between the sites, waiting time on a single site, number of trapping sites, and IR las...

We demonstrate a wavelength-tunable, passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser based on graphene and chirped fiber Bragg grating. The saturable absorber used to enable passive mode-locking in the fiber laser is a section of microfiber covered by graphene film, which allows light-graphene interaction via the evanescent field of the microfiber. The wavelength of the laser can be continuously...

A diode-side-pumped, high-energy, high-beam-quality, pulsed solid-state Nd3+:Y3Al5O12 (Nd:YAG) laser with a thermoelectric cooler (TEC) is investigated in this study. The pump laser was a pulsed laser diode array with maximum peak power of 15 kW. A 350 mJ laser pulse was obtained with a wavelength of 1064 nm, a pulse duration of 10 ns, a total electrical-to-optical efficiency of 7.5%, a relativ...

A basic set of equations describing the interaction of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with a laser field is derived based on a semiclassical model and applied to the problem of mutual guiding of laser and BEC atomic beams. Within this framework we have studied stationary spatially localized solutions of the nonlinear system which describe possible laser and BEC atomic beam guiding and have sh...