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arXiv:2604.00506

Ultra-high precision speckle spectrometer enabling radio-frequency scale resolution of atomic spectra

Gabriel Britto Monteiro, Christopher Perrella, Sarah K. Scholten, Morgan Facchin, Andre Nicholas Luiten, Graham D. Bruce, Kishan Dholakia

Published Apr 1, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Laser speckle, the granular intensity pattern arising from random optical interference, provides a high-dimensional encoding of spectral information that can be exploited for precision metrology. Speckle-based spectrometers have advanced rapidly owing to their compact footprint, mechanical robustness and alignment agnostic nature, yet their spectral resolution has remained limited to the picometre scale. In this work, we break this limit by employing an integrating sphere as a multiply scattering cavity with access to a high range of path lengths to enhance spectral sensitivity. At 780$\,$nm, the resulting device achieves a resolution of 6$\,$fm, corresponding to a resolving power of $1.3\times10^8$, representing an approximately 80-fold improvement over previous implementations. This ultra-high resolution enables clear discrimination of laser sidebands generated by an electro-optical modulator, with extracted sideband powers agreeing with expected values to within 1%. It further permits the first direct speckle-based measurement of the hyperfine structure of the $\text{D}_{2}$ transition in $^{85}\text{Rb}$, with transmission spectra differing by no more than 3.6% from independent wavemeter-referenced measurements. These results establish speckle as a new platform for ultra-high precision spectroscopy, radio-frequency spectrometry, and microwave photonics.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2604.00506

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Frequency-modulation (FM) spectroscopy has been performed on the D(2) transitions of rubidium atoms with an AlGaAs diode laser at 780 nm. Doppler-broadened hyperfine-structure transitions of (85)Rb and (87)Rb were resolved with no residual amplitude-modulation-induced background signal by modulating the injection current of the laser diode at a low frequency (20-50 MHz) compared with the Doppler width. To obtain Doppler-free spectra, we combined FM spectroscopy with saturation spectroscopy. The results show that the FM spectroscopy technique is sensitive and should be useful for high-resolution spectroscopy, although the resolution was instrument limited and unusual double peaks were observed.
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Atomic spectroscopy serves as the basis for quantum precision measurements, where frequency-stabilized lasers are crucial for obtaining accurate atomic spectra.This work introduces a compact laser frequency stabilization system that employs a multifunctional metasurface to adjust the polarization, amplitude, and propagation direction of incident light.By combining with a Rb atomic vapor cell, the system achieves a tunable sub-Doppler spectrum for laser frequency stabilization.The experimental result demonstrates that a laser frequency stability of 3 × 10 -11 is attained from 1 to 200 s at 780 nm with the input power at 20 μW.The devices hold significant potential for compactness, integration, and mass production, making them highly suitable for quantum measurement applications.
Precision measurement has been an important research area in sensing and metrology. In classical physics, the Fisher information determines the maximum extractable information from statistically unknown signals, based on a joint probability density function of independently and identically distributed random variables. The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) indicates the minimum error of the Fisher information, generally known as the shot-noise limit. On the other hand, coherence has pushed the resolution limit further overcoming the diffraction limit using many-wave interference strictly confined to the first-order intensity correlation. However, practical implementation is limited by the lithographic constraints in, e.g., optical gratings. Recently, a coherence technique of superresolution has been introduced to overcome the diffraction limit in phase sensitivity using higher-order intensity correlations of a phase-controlled output field from an interferometer. Here, the superresolution is adopted for precision metrology in an optical spectrometer, whose enhanced frequency resolution is linearly proportional to the intensity-product order, overcoming CRLB. Unlike quantum sensing using entangled photons, this technique is purely classical and offers robust performance against environmental noises, benefiting from the interferometer's scanning mode for fringe counting.