Compact external cavity diode laser for quantum experiments
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Vol.16 No.6, 1 November 2020
Compact external cavity diode laser for quantum experiments* WEI Chun-hua (兿᱕ॾ)1,2,3, ZUO Cheng-lin (ᐖ᷇)1,2**, LIANG Lei (ằ)1,2**, and YAN Shu-hua (仌ṁॾ)3 1. State Key Laboratory of Aerodynamics, China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center, Mianyang 621000, China1 2. Low Speed Aerodynamics Institute, China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center, Mianyang 621000, China 3. Interdisciplinary Center for Quantum Information, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China (Received 12 February 2020; Revised 31 March 2020) ©Tianjin University of Technology and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 We present a compact and practical scheme of building a ~780 nm external cavity diode laser (ECDL) whose wavelength is mainly determined by an interference filter. The Lorentzian linewidth measured by the heterodyne beating between two identical lasers is 60 kHz, and the geometry size of the laser is only 71.5 mm×65 mm×40 mm. The linear cavity design is less sensitive to misalignment induced by mechanical and thermal disturbances, and in comparison to a common grating-based design, the sensitivity to vibration is substantially reduced. Due to its excellent performance, the laser design has already been applied to cold atom trapping experiments. This interference filter ECDL method can also be extended to other wavelengths and widen the application range of diode laser. Document code: A Article ID: 1673-1905(2020)06-0433-4 DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11801-020-0022-1
The use of tunable lasers[1], in particular external cavity diode laser (ECDL)[2–5] has become ubiquitous in atomic physics and quantum optics. The atom optical experiments in the field of quantum degenerated gases[6] or metrology[7] with their future mobile or space-based experiments[8-10] make high demands on the laser systems. The challenge is to design compact and robust laser configurations offering narrow linewidth and high stability. ECDLs use frequency selective feedback to achieve both narrow linewidth and tunability, typically with diffractive gratings in either the Littman–Metcalf[11,12] or the Littrow[11,13,14] configurations. These lasers require precise alignment and are therefore sensitive to acoustic and mechanical disturbances, particularly when a springloaded kinematic mount is used to align the grating or feedback optic. With the development of artificial intelligence, some researchers start to try automatic laser locking scheme by artificial intelligence algorithm[15]. In this paper, we describe a compact ECDL system design in detail at ~780 nm. The geometry size of our laser is 71.5 mm×65 mm×40 mm. Different from the commonly used Littrow and Littmann configurations with diffraction grating involving light reflections, our linear cavity design with interference filter is less sensitive to misalignment induced by mechanical and thermal
disturbances and also reduces the angle change when the laser wavelength is tuned by adjusting the angle of the frequency select
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