Laser-frequency division and stabilization

Abstract

A novel optical interferometric technique is proposed for stabilizing and measuring a laser frequency in terms of an rf standard. In preliminary studies, a sensitive optical dual-frequency modulation scheme allows locking a laser to an optical cavity and the cavity in turn to a radio frequency reference with a noise level of 60 × ${10}^{-3\mathrm{}}$ Hz or 2 parts in ${10}^{10}$. In principle, the laser frequency ${\omega }_0$ can acquire the stability of the rf standard and being locked to a high-order multiple $n$ of the rf frequency ${\omega }_1$ facilitates the optical-rf division $\frac{{\omega }_0}{n}={\omega }_1$.