Cancellation of lateral displacement noise of 3-port gratings for coupling light to cavities

Reflection gratings enable light coupling to optical cavities without transmission through substrates. Gratings that have three ports and are mounted in second-order Littrow configuration even allow the coupling to high-finesse cavities using low diffraction efficiencies. In contrast to conventional transmissive cavity couplers, however, the phase of the diffracted light depends on the lateral position of the grating, which introduces an additional noise coupling. Here we experimentally demonstrate that this kind of noise cancels out once both diffracted output ports of the grating are combined. We achieve the same signal-to-shot-noise ratio as for a conventional coupler. From this perspective, 3-port grating couplers in second-order Littrow configuration remain a valuable approach to reducing optical absorption of cavity coupler substrates in future gravitational wave detectors

Table-Top Milliwatt-Class Extreme Ultraviolet High Harmonic Light Source

Extreme ultraviolet (XUV) lasers are essential for the investigation of fundamental physics. Especially high repetition rate, high photon flux sources are of major interest for reducing acquisition times and improving signal to noise ratios in a plethora of applications. Here, an XUV source based on cascaded frequency conversion is presented, which delivers due to the drastic better single atom response for short wavelength drivers, an average output power of (832 +- 204) {\mu}W at 21.7 eV. This is the highest average power produced by any HHG source in this spectral range surpassing precious demonstrations by more than a factor of four. Furthermore, a narrow-band harmonic at 26.6 eV with a relative energy bandwidth of only {\Delta}E/E= 1.8 x 10E-3 has been generated, which is of high interest for high precision spectroscopy experiments.Comment: 4 Pages, 4 Picture

Wear-Resistant Nanostructured Sol-Gel Coatings for Functional Applications

Improvement of the wear resistance of functional surfaces is crucial in order to facilitate a variety of practical applications, such as self-cleaning or anti-fogging. This especially holds for functional surface nanostructures, whose tops can easily get worn off when exposed to even low abrasion forces. Thus, our work addresses the enhancement of the wear resistance of such fine-scale structures. We present an efficient manufacturing procedure for generating long-term durable surfaces with simultaneously tailored wetting behavior and high optical quality. Our approach is based on a sol-gel coating that consists of an alumina layer with specific nanoroughness yielding the function-relevant surface structure, and a protective thin smooth silica film providing the mechanical robustness without influencing that functional structure. The roughness of the alumina layer can be systematically adjusted, thus enabling us to achieve desired wetting effects all the way up to superhydrophilicity and, after application of an additional thin hydrophobic top coat, to superhydrophobicity. To demonstrate the enhanced robustness of these coatings we perform abrasive wear tests and investigate the impact of abrasion cycles on the wetting effects and optical properties of the coatings. Furthermore, the durability of the structures is directly revealed by advanced roughness characterization procedures based on Atomic Force Microscopy followed by power spectral density function (PSD) analysis

High photon flux table-top coherent extreme ultraviolet source

High harmonic generation (HHG) enables extreme ultraviolet radiation with table-top setups. Its exceptional properties, such as coherence and (sub)-femtosecond pulse durations, have led to a diversity of applications. Some of these require a high photon flux and megahertz repetition rates, e.g. to avoid space charge effects in photoelectron spectroscopy. To date this has only been achieved with enhancement cavities. Here, we establish a novel route towards powerful HHG sources. By achieving phase-matched HHG of a megahertz fibre laser we generate a broad plateau (25 eV - 40 eV) of strong harmonics, each containing more than $10^{12}$ photons/s, which constitutes an increase by more than one order of magnitude in that wavelength range. The strongest harmonic (H25, 30 eV) has an average power of 143 $\mu$W ($3\cdot10^{13}$ photons/s). This concept will greatly advance and facilitate applications in photoelectron or coincidence spectroscopy, coherent diffractive imaging or (multidimensional) surface science

Mechanical losses in low loss materials studied by Cryogenic Resonant Acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectroscopy)

Mechanical losses of crystalline silicon and calcium fluoride have been analyzed in the temperature range from 5 to 300 K by our novel mechanical spectroscopy method, cryogenic resonant acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectrocopy). The focus lies on the interpretation of the measured data according to phonon-phonon interactions and defect induced losses in consideration of the excited mode shape.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of the PHONONS 2007, submitted to Journal of Physics: Conference Serie

Precision manufacturing of a lightweight mirror body made by selective laser melting

This article presents a new and individual way to generate opto-mechanical components by Additive Manufacturing, embedded in an established process chain for the fabrication of metal optics. The freedom of design offered by additive techniques gives the opportunity to produce more lightweight parts with improved mechanical stability. The latter is demonstrated by simulations of several models of metal mirrors with a constant outer shape but varying mass reduction factors. The optimized lightweight mirror exhibits $63.5 \%$ of mass reduction and a higher stiffness compared to conventional designs, but it is not manufacturable by cutting techniques. Utilizing Selective Laser Melting instead, a demonstrator of the mentioned topological non-trivial design is manufactured out of AlSi12 alloy powder. It is further shown that -- like in case of a traditional manufactured mirror substrate -- optical quality can be achieved by diamond turning, electroless nickel plating, and polishing techniques, which finally results in $< 150$~nm peak-to-valley shape deviation and a roughness of $< 1$~nm rms in a measurement area of $140 \times 110$ $\mu$m${}^2$. Negative implications from the additive manufacturing are shown to be negligible. Further it is shown that surface form is maintained over a two year storage period under ambient conditions.Comment: 13 pages, 19 figures, online version (corrected proof

Competing nonlinearities in quadratic nonlinear waveguide arrays

We demonstrate experimentally the existence of competing focusing and defocusing nonlinearities in a double-resonant system with quadratic nonlinear response. We use an array of periodically poled coupled optical waveguides and observe inhibition of the nonlinear beam self-action independent on power. This inhibition is demonstrated in both regimes of normal and anomalous beam diffraction.We acknowledge support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG–Research Unit 532), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Innoregio-ZIK), the Australian Research Council, and the Australian Academy of Science