Precision locking CW laser to ultrastable optical frequency comb by feed-forward method

Abstract

We locked a 1064 nm continuous wave (CW) laser to a Yb:fiber optical frequency comb stabilized to an ultrastable 972 nm CW laser with the feed-forward method. Consequently, the stability and coherent properties of the ultrastable laser are precisely transferred to the 1064 nm CW laser through the frequency comb’s connection. The relative linewidth of the frequency-stabilized 1064 nm CW laser is narrowed to 1.14 mHz, and the stability reaches 1.5 × 10−17/s at the optical wavelength of 1064 nm. The phase noise characterization in the 1 mHz–10 MHz range is presented to indicate that feed-forward locking a CW laser to an ultrastable comb will offer a potential technique for many important applications, such as optical frequency synthesis and gravitational wave detection.