Microresonator frequency comb optical clock

By S. Papp, K. Beha, Pascaline Delhaye, F. Quinlan, Hansuek Lee, Kerry J. Vahala, Scott A. Diddams. 2013

428 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical frequency combs serve as the clockwork of optical clocks, which are now the best time-keeping systems in existence. The use of precise optical time and frequency technology in various applications beyond the research lab remains a significant challenge, but one that integrated microresonator technology is poised to address. Here, we report a silicon-chip-based microresonator comb optical clock that converts an optical frequency reference to a microwave signal. A comb spectrum with a 25 THz span is generated with a 2 mm diameter silica disk and broadening in nonlinear fiber. This spectrum is stabilized to rubidium frequency references separated by 3.5 THz by controlling two teeth 108 modes apart. The optical clock’s output is the electronically countable 33 GHz microcomb line spacing, which features stability better than the rubidium transitions by the expected factor of 108. Our work demonstrates the comprehensive set of tools needed for interfacing microcombs to state-of-the-art optical clocks.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17876aeba224951bce1606431d72497e00002e69

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

RF Photonics: An Optical Microcombs’ Perspective (2018, background): “breakup of the optical micro-comb into various sub-combs under certain coupling conditions [26], [167].”
Optical data transmission at 44Tb/s and 10 bits/s/Hz over the C-band with standard fibre and a single micro-comb source (2020, background): “While this would require locking the comb spacing to an external RF source, sub-MHz stabilization of comb spacings has been reported [54, 55].”
Breaking the Loss Limitation of On-chip High-confinement Resonators (2016, background): “Low propagation loss silicon nitride (Si3N4) ring resonators are critical for a variety of photonic applications such as efficient and compact on-chip optical routing [1,2], low threshold frequency combs [3-5], optical clocks [6] and high precision sensing [7-11].”
Kerr optical frequency combs: theory, applications and perspectives (2016, background): “Kerr combs have been successfully stabilized to atomic rubidium transitions as well [63].”