Spiral resonators for on-chip laser frequency stabilization.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lee H
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3778514 | biostudies-other | 2013
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Similar Datasets
Project description:Ultrastable high-spectral-purity lasers have served as the cornerstone behind optical atomic clocks, quantum measurements, precision optical microwave generation, high-resolution optical spectroscopy, and sensing. Hertz-level lasers stabilized to high-finesse Fabry-Pérot cavities are typically used for these studies, which are large and fragile and remain laboratory instruments. There is a clear demand for rugged miniaturized lasers with stabilities comparable to those of bulk lasers. Over the past decade, ultrahigh-Q optical whispering-gallery-mode resonators have served as a platform for low-noise microlasers but have not yet reached the stabilities defined by their fundamental noise. Here, we show the noise characteristics of whispering-gallery-mode resonators and demonstrate a resonator-stabilized laser at this limit by compensating the intrinsic thermal expansion, allowing a sub-25 Hz linewidth and a 32 Hz Allan deviation. We also reveal the environmental sensitivities of the resonator at the thermodynamical noise limit and long-term frequency drifts governed by random-walk-noise statistics.High-quality optical resonators have the potential to provide a miniaturized frequency reference for metrology and sensing but they often lack stability. Here, Lim et al. experimentally characterize the stability of whispering-gallery resonators at their fundamental noise limits.
| S-EPMC5431900 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Microfabricated mechanical resonators enable precision measurement techniques from atomic force microscopy to emerging quantum applications. The resonance frequency-based physical sensing combines high precision with long-term stability. However, widely used Si3N4 resonators suffer from frequency sensitivity to temperature due to the differential thermal expansion vs the Si substrates. Here we experimentally demonstrate temperature- and residual stress-insensitive 16.51 MHz tuning fork nanobeam resonators with nonlinear clamps defining the stress and frequency by design, achieving a low fractional frequency sensitivity of (2.5 ± 0.8) × 10-6 K-1, a 72× reduction. On-chip optical readout of resonator thermomechanical fluctuations allows precision frequency measurement without any external excitation at the thermodynamically limited frequency Allan deviation of ≈7 Hz/Hz1/2 and (relative) bias stability of ≈10 Hz (≈ 0.6 × 10-6) above 1 s averaging, remarkably, on par with state-of-the-art driven devices of similar mass. Both the resonator stabilization and the passive frequency readout can benefit a wide variety of micromechanical sensors.
| S-EPMC7558603 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mechanical resonators are widely used as precision clocks and sensitive detectors that rely on the stability of their eigenfrequencies. The phase noise is determined by different factors including thermal noise, frequency noise of the resonator and noise in the feedback circuitry. Increasing the vibration amplitude can mitigate some of these effects but the improvements are limited by nonlinearities that are particularly strong for miniaturized micro- and nano-mechanical systems. Here we design a micromechanical resonator with non-monotonic dependence of the eigenfrequency on energy. Near the extremum, where the dispersion of the eigenfrequency is zero, the system regains certain characteristics of a linear resonator, albeit at large amplitudes. The spectral peak undergoes narrowing when the noise intensity is increased. With the resonator serving as the frequency-selecting element in a feedback loop, the phase noise at the extremum amplitude is?~3 times smaller than the minimal noise in the conventional nonlinear regime.
| S-EPMC6718662 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The coherent transduction of information between microwave and optical domains is a fundamental building block for future quantum networks. A promising way to bridge these widely different frequencies is using high-frequency nanomechanical resonators interacting with low-loss optical modes. State-of-the-art optomechanical devices rely on purely dispersive interactions that are enhanced by a large photon population in the cavity. Additionally, one could use dissipative optomechanics, where photons can be scattered directly from a waveguide into a resonator hence increasing the degree of control of the acousto-optic interplay. Hitherto, such dissipative optomechanical interaction was only demonstrated at low mechanical frequencies, precluding prominent applications such as the quantum state transfer between photonic and phononic domains. Here, we show the first dissipative optomechanical system operating in the sideband-resolved regime, where the mechanical frequency is larger than the optical linewidth. Exploring this unprecedented regime, we demonstrate the impact of dissipative optomechanical coupling in reshaping both mechanical and optical spectra. Our figures represent a two-order-of-magnitude leap in the mechanical frequency and a tenfold increase in the dissipative optomechanical coupling rate compared to previous works. Further advances could enable the individual addressing of mechanical modes and help mitigate optical nonlinearities and absorption in optomechanical devices.
| S-EPMC10507050 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The ability to engineer quantum-cascade-lasers (QCLs) with ultrabroad gain spectra, and with a full compensation of the group velocity dispersion, at terahertz (THz) frequencies, is key for devising monolithic and miniaturized optical frequency-comb-synthesizers (FCSs) in the far-infrared. In THz QCLs four-wave mixing, driven by intrinsic third-order susceptibility of the intersubband gain medium, self-locks the optical modes in phase, allowing stable comb operation, albeit over a restricted dynamic range (∼20% of the laser operational range). Here, we engineer miniaturized THz FCSs, comprising a heterogeneous THz QCL, integrated with a tightly coupled, on-chip, solution-processed, graphene saturable-absorber reflector that preserves phase-coherence between lasing modes, even when four-wave mixing no longer provides dispersion compensation. This enables a high-power (8 mW) FCS with over 90 optical modes, through 55% of the laser operational range. We also achieve stable injection-locking, paving the way to a number of key applications, including high-precision tunable broadband-spectroscopy and quantum-metrology.
| S-EPMC7747868 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Optical microcavities can be designed to take advantage of total internal reflection, which results in resonators supporting whispering-gallery modes (WGMs) with a high-quality factor (Q factor). One of the crucial problems of these devices for practical applications such as designing microcavity lasers, however, is that their emission is nondirectional due to their radial symmetry, in addition to their inefficient power output coupling. Here we report the design of elliptical resonators with a wavelength-size notch at the boundary, which support in-plane highly unidirectional laser emission from WGMs. The notch acts as a small scatterer such that the Q factor of the WGMs is still very high. Using midinfrared (? ? 10 ?m) injection quantum cascade lasers as a model system, an in-plane beam divergence as small as 6 deg with a peak optical power of ?5 mW at room temperature has been demonstrated. The beam divergence is insensitive to the pumping current and to the notch geometry, demonstrating the robustness of this resonator design. The latter is scalable to the visible and the near infrared, thus opening the door to very low-threshold, highly unidirectional microcavity diode lasers.
| S-EPMC3012530 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The hemispherical resonator gyroscope (HRG) has attracted the interest of the world inertial navigation community because of its exceptional performance, ultra-high reliability and its potential to be miniaturized. These devices achieve their best performance when the differences in the frequencies of the two degenerate working modes are eliminated. Mechanical treatment, laser ablation, ion-beams etching, etc., have all been applied for the frequency tuning of resonators, however, they either require costly equipment and procedures, or alter the quality factors of the resonators significantly. In this paper, we experimentally investigated for the first time the use of a chemical etching procedure to decrease the frequency splits of hemispherical resonators. We provide a theoretical analysis of the chemical etching procedure, as well as the relation between frequency splits and mass errors. Then we demonstrate that the frequency split could be decreased to below 0.05 Hz by the proposed chemical etching procedure. Results also showed that the chemical etching method caused no damage to the quality factors. Compared with other tuning methods, the chemical etching method is convenient to implement, requiring less time and labor input. It can be regarded as an effective trimming method for obtaining medium accuracy hemispherical resonator gyroscopes.
| S-EPMC6263873 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Despite the recent emergence of microcavity resonators as label-free biological and chemical sensors, practical applications still require simple and robust methods to impart chemical selectivity and reduce the cost of fabrication. We introduce the use of hydrocarbon-in-fluorocarbon-in-water (HC/FC/W) double emulsions as a liquid top cladding that expands the versatility of optical resonators as chemical sensors. The all-liquid complex emulsions are tunable droplets that undergo dynamic and reversible morphological transformations in response to a change in the chemical environment (e.g., exposure to targeted analytes). This chemical-morphological coupling drastically modifies the effective refractive index, allowing the complex emulsions to act as a chemical transducer and signal amplifier. We detect this large change in the refractive index by tracking the shift of the enveloped resonant spectrum of a silicon nitride (Si3N4) racetrack resonator-based sensor, which correlates well with a change in the morphology of the complex droplets. This combination of soft materials (dynamic complex emulsions) and hard materials (on-chip resonators) provides a unique platform for liquid-phase, real-time, and continuous detection of chemicals and biomolecules for miniaturized and remote, environmental, medical, and wearable sensing applications.
| S-EPMC7384970 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Stochastic switching between the two bistable states of a strongly driven mechanical resonator enables detection of weak signals based on probability distributions, in a manner that mimics biological systems. However, conventional silicon resonators at the microscale require a large amount of fluctuation power to achieve a switching rate in the order of a few hertz. Here, we employ graphene membrane resonators of atomic thickness to achieve a stochastic switching rate of 4.1 kHz, which is 100 times faster than current state-of-the-art. The (effective) temperature of the fluctuations is approximately 400 K, which is 3000 times lower than the state-of-the-art. This shows that these membranes are potentially useful to transduce weak signals in the audible frequency domain. Furthermore, we perform numerical simulations to understand the transition dynamics of the resonator and use analytical expressions to investigate the relevant scaling parameters that allow high-frequency, low-temperature stochastic switching to be achieved in mechanical resonators.
| S-EPMC6391039 | biostudies-literature
Project description:By providing an effective way to leverage nonlinear phenomena in integrated devices, high-Q optical resonators have led to recent advances in on-chip photonics. However, developing fabrication processes to shape any new material into a resonator with extremely smooth surfaces on a chip has been an exceptionally challenging task. Here, we describe a universal method to implement ultra-high-Q resonators with any new material having desirable properties that can be deposited by physical vapor deposition. Using this method light-guiding cores with surface roughness on the molecular-scale are created automatically on pre-patterned substrates. Its efficacy has been verified using As2S3, a chalcogenide glass that has high-nonlinearity. The Q-factor of the As2S3 resonator so-developed approached the propagation loss record achieved in chalcogenide fibers which were limited by material losses. Owing to the boosted Q-factor, lasing by stimulated Brillouin scattering has been demonstrated with 100 times lower threshold power than the previous record.
| S-EPMC7683556 | biostudies-literature