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arXiv:1505.02084 · Optics Express

High-bandwidth transfer of phase stability through a fiber frequency comb

Nils Scharnhorst, Jannes B. Wübbena, Stephan Hannig, Kornelius Jakobsen, Johannes Kramer, Ian D. Leroux, Piet O. Schmidt

Published Jul 22, 2015• 31 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We demonstrate phase locking of a 729 nm diode laser to a 1542 nm master laser via an erbium-doped-fiber frequency comb, using a transfer-oscillator feedforward scheme which suppresses the effect of comb noise in an unprecedented 1.8 MHz bandwidth. We illustrate its performance by carrying out coherent manipulations of a trapped calcium ion with 99 % fidelity even at few-μs timescales. We thus demonstrate that transfer-oscillator locking can provide sufficient phase stability for high-fidelity quantum logic manipulation even without pre-stabilization of the slave diode laser.

DOI
10.1364/oe.23.019771

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Physical Review Applied•Mar 26, 2025•1 citation
We demonstrate phase locking of a 729 nm diode laser to a 1542 nm master laser via an erbium-doped-fiber frequency comb, using a transfer-oscillator feedforward scheme which suppresses the effect of comb noise in an unprecedented 1.8 MHz bandwidth. We illustrate its performance by carrying out coherent manipulations of a trapped calcium ion with 99 % fidelity even at few-μs timescales. We thus demonstrate that transfer-oscillator locking can provide sufficient phase stability for high-fidelity quantum logic manipulation even without pre-stabilization of the slave diode laser.
Lasers with high spectral purity are indispensable for optical clocks and for the coherent manipulation of atomic and molecular qubits in applications such as quantum computing and quantum simulation. While the stabilization of such lasers to a reference can provide a narrow linewidth, the widely used diode lasers exhibit fast phase noise that prevents high-fidelity qubit manipulation. In this paper, we demonstrate a self-injection locked diode laser system that utilizes a high-finesse cavity. This cavity not only provides a stable resonance frequency, it also acts as a low-pass filter for phase noise beyond the cavity linewidth of around 100 kHz, resulting in low phase noise from dc to the injection lock limit. We model the expected laser performance and benchmark it using a single trapped 40 Ca + -ion as a spectrum analyzer. We show that the fast phase noise of the laser at relevant Fourier frequencies of 100 kHz to >2 MHz is suppressed to a noise floor of between −110 dBc/Hz and −120 dBc/Hz, an improvement of 20 to 30 dB over state-of-the-art Pound-Drever-Hall-stabilized extended-cavity diode lasers. This strong suppression avoids incoherent (spurious) spin flips during manipulation of optical qubits and improves laser-driven gates when using diode lasers in applications involving quantum logic spectroscopy, quantum simulation, and quantum computation.
Stringent conditions on the phase relation of multiple photons are a prerequisite for novel protocols of high-resolution coherent spectroscopy. In a recent experiment, we have implemented an interrogation process of a Ca+-ion cloud based on three-photon coherent population trapping, with the potential to serve as a frequency reference in the THz range. This high-resolution interrogation has been made possible by phase-locking both laser sources for cooling and repumping of the trapped ions to a clock laser at 729 nm by means of an optical frequency comb. The clock laser, a titanium-sapphire laser built in our lab locked onto two high-finesse cavities reaches a linewidth of a few Hertz and a frequency stability below 10−14 at 1 s, performances which can be copied onto the two other sources. In this paper, we discuss the performances of the phase transfer between the three involved lasers via the optical frequency comb.
Ultra-narrow-linewidth lasers with suppressed high-frequency phase noise are critical for quantum control and precision metrology. While optical phase locking (OPL) is the standard technique for cloning the coherence of such sources, its effectiveness is often limited at high frequencies by feedback latency. We present a robust feedforward architecture that overcomes this limitation by recycling and demodulating the existing master-slave beat signal to drive a single electro-optic modulator for near-instantaneous noise cancellation. This approach eliminates the extraneous sidebands and transmission losses typical of more complex modulators. Through active stabilization of the beat amplitude and demodulation phase, we demonstrate robust suppression exceeding 30 dB from 10 kHz to 10 MHz. This hardware-efficient framework is readily compatible with standard OPL setups, offering a scalable solution for high-fidelity coherent control.
Lasers with high spectral purity are indispensable for optical clocks and coherent manipulation of atomic and molecular qubits for applications such as quantum computing and quantum simulation. Stabilisation of the laser to a reference can provide a narrow linewidth and high spectral purity. However, widely-used diode lasers exhibit fast phase noise that prevents high fidelity qubit manipulation. Here we demonstrate a self-injection locked diode laser system utilizing a medium finesse cavity. The cavity not only provides a stable resonance frequency, but at the same time acts as a low-pass filter for phase noise beyond the cavity linewidth of around 100 kHz, resulting in low phase noise from dc to the injection lock limit. We model the expected laser performance and benchmark it using a single trapped 40^{40}40Ca+^{+}+-ion as a spectrum analyser. We show that the fast phase noise of the laser at relevant Fourier frequencies of 100 kHz to >2 MHz is suppressed to a noise floor of between -110 dBc/Hz and -120 dBc/Hz, an improvement of 20 to 30 dB over state-of-the-art Pound-Drever-Hall-stabilized extended-cavity diode lasers. This strong suppression avoids incoherent (spurious) spin flips during manipulation of optical qubits and improves laser-driven gates in using diode lasers with applications in quantum logic spectroscopy, quantum simulation and quantum computation.
Single mode laser fields oscillate at frequencies well outside the realm of electronics, but their phase/frequency fluctuations fall into the radio frequency domain, where direct manipulation is possible. Electro-optic devices have sufficient bandwidth for controlling and tailoring the dynamics of a laser field down to sub-nanosecond time scales. Thus, a laser field can be arbitrarily reshaped and in particular its phase/frequency fluctuations can be in principle removed. In practice, the time evolution of a reference laser field can be cloned to replace the fluctuations of another laser field, at a close-by frequency. In fact, it is possible to exploit a partially stabilized optical comb to perform the cloning across a large frequency gap. We realize this long-haul phase transfer by using a fibered Mach-Zehnder single-sideband modulator driven by an appropriate mix of the beat notes of the master and the slave laser with the comb.
We report on a laser-frequency-stabilization and phase-noise-filtering scheme at 871 nm for high-quality quantum operations with an optical 2S1/2{}^{2}{\mathrm{S}}_{1/2}2S1/2​--2D3/2{}^{2}{\mathrm{D}}_{3/2}2D3/2​ qubit in the 171Yb+{}^{171}\mathrm{Yb}{}^{+}171Yb+ ion. The phase noise of the laser field in a frequency range close to the trapped ion's secular frequencies (0.5--2 MHz) causes undesirable excitations and thus reduces the fidelities of both single- and two-qubit gates. The most common way to overcome this problem is to filter this noise by passing the laser light through a cavity that suppresses high-frequency phase noise and provides a pure laser spectrum. Usually, the same cavity also serves as a reference for long-term frequency stabilization. We propose and characterize an improved laser-stabilization scheme consisting of (i) a reference laser locked to a high-finesse optical cavity providing a narrow linewidth and long-term frequency stability and (ii) a main laser locked to a tunable medium-finesse cavity for phase-noise filtering. The phase locking of the medium-finesse cavity resonance to the reference laser transfers its long-term stability to the main laser. This approach allows independent optimization of both the phase-noise filtering and long-term frequency-stabilization processes, as well as ensuring the robustness of the setup. The resulting laser spectrum is characterized by direct spectroscopy of an 171Yb+{}^{171}\mathrm{Yb}{}^{+}171Yb+ ion in a linear Paul trap. We estimate the expected two-qubit gate infidelity with the filtered laser field to be well below 1%.