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arXiv:1612.00912 · Optics Letters

Amplification of a nanosecond laser pulse chain via dynamic injection locking of a laser diode

Jun He, Gang Jin, Bei Liu, Junmin Wang

Published Dec 7, 2016• 5 citations

Abstract

We report a novel optical pulse generation method for high-speed wavelength switching of amplified nanosecond (ns) laser pulses resonant to atomic transitions. Under free-running conditions, a slave laser diode is blue-detuned with tens of GHz relative to the master laser. A nanosecond pulse chain generated by modulating the continuous-wave master laser with a fiber-pigtailed electro-optical intensity modulator is injected into the slave laser diode to fast switch the slave laser’s wavelength back and forth. The output beam of the slave laser is filtered by a temperature-controlled etalon to get the amplified pulse chain. Based on our dynamic injection locking scheme, we produce an ns-scale square pulse chain with an effective ON/OFF ratio ∼108, considering at least the 60 dB scattering suppression by tuning the light-atom interactions with far off-resonance detuning and the 26.7 dB suppression ratio of the etalon. By studying the dynamic processes of injection locking, we determine the dependence of injection locking on both the injection power and the frequency detuning.

DOI: 10.1364/ol.41.005724

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Two phase-coherent Raman laser beams with a frequency offset of 6.835 GHz were generated by sideband injection-locking technique. A master diode laser was phase-modulated at 6.835 GHz by a fiber electro-optic modulator. A slave diode was injection-locked to the -1 sideband of the phase-modulated beam, and another diode was locked to the master laser carrier. This method produced stable and spatially separated Raman lasers with a large frequency shift range (>180 MHz). The relative linewidth of these two beams was ∼1 Hz, and the unwanted carrier mode was suppressed down to -24 dB. Stimulated Raman transitions and Ramsey fringes were driven by Raman lasers in a cold atomic beam.

Raman pulse sequences are generally used to coherently manipulate the atomic wave packet in an atom interferometer.High power Raman beams allow more atoms join in the velocity-sensitive stimulated Raman transition,and that will be helpful for obtaining high signal to noise ratio in atom interferometer fringe.Development of high power Raman laser is important for cold atom interferometer experiments.The experimental realization of high power Raman lasers are demonstrated based on injection locking technique. Master laser is modulated by a 1.5 GHz acousto-optical modulator,and the±1 order diffraction lights are used as seeding Raman lasers.The seeding lasers are injection locked to two slave lasers which are further amplified as Raman beams.The frequency difference of Raman beams is 3.0 GHz,and the detuning range is about 200 MHz.

A series of simple and low-cost devices for switching, amplifying, and chirping diode lasers based on current modulation are presented. Direct modulation of diode laser currents is rarely sufficient to establish precise amplitude and phase control over light, as its effects on these parameters are not independent. These devices overcome this limitation by exploiting amplifier saturation and dramatically outperform commonly used external modulators in key figures of merit for quantum technological applications. Semiconductor optical amplifiers operated on either rubidium D line are recast as intensity switches and shown to achieve ON:OFF ratios >106 in as little as 50 ns. Current is switched to a 795 nm wavelength (Rb D1) tapered amplifier to produce optical pulses of few nanosecond duration and peak powers of 3 W at a similar extinction ratio. Fast rf pulses are applied directly to a laser diode to shift its emission frequency by up to 300 MHz in either direction and at a maximum chirp rate of 150 MHz ns-1. Finally, the latter components are combined, yielding a system that produces watt-level optical pulses with arbitrary frequency chirps in the given range and <2% residual intensity variation, all within 65 ns upon asynchronous demand. Such systems have broad application in atomic, molecular, and optical physics and are of particular interest to fast experiments simultaneously requiring high power and low noise, for example, quantum memory experiments with atomic vapors.

The switch-off time in a dispersive bistable laser amplifier is usually considered to be limited by the inverse of the effective carrier lifetime, the switch-off can be faster with the laser diode operating very near threshold. On the other hand, optical bistability (OB) has also been found recently in optically injection-locked semiconductor lasers; in this case however the dynamic properties have not yet been investigated. Our measured results reveal that the OB switch-off can be much faster than the carrier lifetime when the slave laser is biased far above threshold. In the experiment, two identical 1554 nm DFB-BH laser diodes ase used in the master-slave mode.>

We produced two Raman-laser beams with a frequency offset of 9.2 GHz by injection-locking of a master diode-laser to a slave diode-laser. The master laser was phase-modulated at 9.2 GHz while the laser beam passed through an electrooptic modulator. The phase-modulated beam was injected into the slave laser that was oscillating around one of the side-bands of the master laser. The relative linewidth of the two lasers was less than 10 Hz. Using these laser beams, coherent population trapping resonance of cesium atoms was observed for the purpose of testing the phase-coherence of the laser beams.

Switching between states in a dispersive bistable injection-locked slave laser has been theoretically investigated. We show that the switching can be achieved by relatively small and short (≈10-50 ps) variation of the master laser injection power or frequency, which, besides the variation of the slave laser optical power, leads to significant variation of its photon phase (≈5π/6). By using an analytical model, we calculate the switching time dependence on the magnitude of the injection power and the frequency detuning variation.