A microphotonic astrocomb

By E. Obrzud, M. Rainer, A. Harutyunyan, M. Anderson, Junqiu Liu, M. Geiselmann, B. Chazelas, S. Kundermann, Steve Lecomte, M. Cecconi and 7 more. Nature Photonics, 2017

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Earth-like planets, dark energy and variability of fundamental physical constants can be discovered by observing wavelength shifts in the optical spectra of astronomical objects1–5. These wavelength shifts are so tiny that exquisitely accurate and precise wavelength calibration of astronomical spectrometers is required. Laser frequency combs, broadband spectra of laser lines with absolutely known optical frequencies, are uniquely suited for this purpose6–13, provided their lines are resolved by the spectrometer. Generating such astronomical laser frequency combs (‘astrocombs’) remains challenging. Here, a microphotonic astrocomb is demonstrated via temporal dissipative Kerr solitons14–16 in photonic-chip-based silicon nitride microresonators17, directly providing a spurious-free spectrum of resolvable calibration lines. Sub-harmonically driven by temporally structured light18, the astrocomb is stabilized to a frequency standard, resulting in absolute calibration with a precision of 25 cm s–1 (radial velocity equivalent), relevant for Earth-like planet detection and cosmological research. The microphotonic technology can be extended in spectral span17,19–24, further boosting the calibration precision.A microphotonic astrocomb is demonstrated via temporal dissipative Kerr solitons in photonic-chip-based silicon nitride microresonators with a precision of 25 cm s–1 (radial velocity equivalent), useful for Earth-like planet detection and cosmological research.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67bec5a26d82903d78df6aa2ad2aa667f35a0e50

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, methodology): “This scheme also has been demonstrated for Si3N4 microresonators for efficient and broadband comb generation (49).”
Photonic matrix multiplication lights up photonic accelerator and beyond (2022, background): “Compared to other physical dimensions, the wavelength dimension has the most abundant orthogonal channels in optics, up to hundreds of channels 80,81 .”
A self-starting bi-chromatic LiNbO3 soliton microcomb (2018, methodology): “To determine the photorefractive response time constant, we employed a pump-probe approach [8, 9] where a sinusoidal modulation on a pump wave launched into a cavity mode modulates the refractive index which, in turn, is sensed by a weak probe wave launched into a separate cavity mode.”