Crystalline optical cavity at 4 K with thermal-noise-limited instability and ultralow drift

By J. Robinson, E. Oelker, W. Milner, T. Legero, D. Matei, Fritz Riehle, U. Sterr, Jun Ye. Optica, 2018

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Crystalline optical cavities are the foundation of today's state-of-the-art ultrastable lasers. Building on our previous silicon cavity effort, we now achieve the fundamental thermal noise-limited stability for a 6 cm long silicon cavity cooled to 4 Kelvin, reaching $6.5\times10^{-17}$ from 0.8 to 80 seconds. We also report for the first time a clear linear dependence of the cavity frequency drift on the incident optical power. The lowest fractional frequency drift of $-3\times10^{-19}$/s is attained at a transmitted power of 40 nW, with an extrapolated drift approaching zero in the absence of optical power. These demonstrations provide a promising direction to reach a new performance domain for stable lasers, with stability better than $1\times10^{-17}$ and fractional linear drift below $1\times10^{-19}$/s.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbf543e077b98648f6ca9684c07de5693f0ee2b1