Active Faraday optical frequency standards

We propose the mechanism of active Faraday optical clock, and experimentally demonstrate active Faraday optical frequency standards based on 852 nm narrow bandwidth Faraday atomic filter by the method of velocity-selective optical pumping of cesium vapor. The center frequency of the active Faraday optical frequency standards is determined by the cesium 6 $^{2}S_{1/2}$ $F$ = 4 to 6 $^{2}P_{3/2}$ $F'$ = 4 and 5 crossover transition line. The optical heterodyne beat between two similar independent setups shows that the frequency linewidth reaches 996(26) Hz, which is 5.3 $\times$ 10$^{3}$ times smaller than the natural linewidth of the cesium 852 nm transition line. The maximum emitted light power reaches 75 \upmuW. The active Faraday optical frequency standards reported here have advantages of narrow linewidth and reduced cavity pulling, which can readily be extended to other atomic transition lines of alkali and alkaline-earth metal atoms trapped in optical lattices at magic wavelengths, making it useful for new generation of optical atomic clocks.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

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

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.Comment: 4 pages, 4 Encapsulated PostScript figure

Hanle detection for optical clocks

Considering the strong inhomogeneous spatial polarization and intensity distribution of spontaneous decay fluorescence due to the Hanle effect, we propose and demonstrate a universe Hanle detection configuration of electron-shelving method for optical clocks. Experimental results from Ca atomic beam optical frequency standard with 423 nm electron-shelving method show that a designed Hanle detection geometry with optimized magnetic field direction, detection laser beam propagation and polarization direction, and detector position can improve the fluorescence collection rate by more than one order of magnitude comparing with that of inefficient geometry. With the fixed 423 nm fluorescence, the improved 657 nm optical frequency standard signal intensity is presented. And the potential application of the Hanle detection geometry designed for facilitating the fluorescence collection for optical lattice clock with a limited solid angle of the fluorescence collection has been discussed. This Hanle detection configuration is also effective for ion detection in ion optical clock and quantum information experiments. Besides, a cylinder fluorescence collection structure is designed to increase the solid angle of the fluorescence collection in Ca atomic beam optical frequency standard.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure