An optical phase-locking with large and tunable frequency difference based on vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser

Abstract

We present a novel technique to phase-lock two lasers with controllable frequency difference. In our setup, one sideband of a current modulated Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL) is phase locked to the master laser by injection seeding, while another sideband of the VCSEL is used to phase lock the slave laser. The slave laser is therefore locked in phase with the master laser, with a frequency difference tunable up to about 35 GHz. The sideband suppression rate of the slave laser is more than 30dB at 30 uW seed power. The heterodyne spectrum between master and slave has a linewidth of less than 1 Hz. A coherent population trapping resonance of rubidium is achieved using such beams.