A Portable Optical Frequency Comb with Low Repetition-Rate Drift Based on "Optical Cubes"

Abstract

We demonstrate a compact, fully stabilized, all-polarization-maintaining (all-PM) Er:fiber optical frequency comb (OFC) implemented on a silica optical-cube platform. The optical comb module, including the oscillator, amplifier, spectral-broadening stage, 780-nm frequency-doubling branch, and f-to-2f interferometer, occupies a volume of 0.88 L. Without active temperature control, the free-running repetition frequency exhibits a peak-to-peak excursion of 75 Hz over 10 h, corresponding to 0.375 ppm. Under the same laboratory conditions, this excursion is 6.2 times smaller than that of a mechanically mounted non-PM reference comb. The amplified pulses are compressed to 94 fs and spectrally broadened in a PM highly nonlinear fiber. A coherent-population-trapping-based chip-scale atomic clock is employed for the first time as the radio-frequency reference for comb locking, thereby reducing the footprint of the microwave-reference subsystem. The resulting in-loop, optical-frequency-normalized tracking instability reaches 6.03E-17 at 1 s and 2.57E-18 at 10,000 s. These results demonstrate a compact comb architecture with reduced sensitivity to environmental perturbations, providing a practical route toward portable optical atomic clocks.