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Applied Optics

Nonlinear polarization spectroscopy of a Rydberg state for laser stabilization

David H. Meyer, Paul D. Kunz, Neal Solmeyer

Published Nov 8, 2016• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate modulation-free laser stabilization to an atomic Rydberg transition using nonlinear polarization spectroscopy. To stabilize a laser to the upper transition of a three-level ladder scheme, the techniques of standard polarization spectroscopy are adapted to use a narrow, nonlinear coherence feature. We obtain a subnatural linewidth dispersive signal that is directly suitable for laser frequency stabilization. We examine the effect of laser polarization on the dispersive line shape. This technique stabilizes the laser to an absolute frequency reference, can be used with numerous Rydberg levels, and eliminates laser modulation, which can enable high bandwidth feedback.

DOI
10.1364/ao.56.000b92

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We demonstrate modulation-free laser stabilization to an atomic Rydberg transition using nonlinear polarization spectroscopy. To stabilize a laser to the upper transition of a three-level ladder scheme, the techniques of standard polarization spectroscopy are adapted to use a narrow, nonlinear coherence feature. We obtain a subnatural linewidth dispersive signal that is directly suitable for laser frequency stabilization. We examine the effect of laser polarization on the dispersive line shape. This technique stabilizes the laser to an absolute frequency reference, can be used with numerous Rydberg levels, and eliminates laser modulation, which can enable high bandwidth feedback.
We herein develop and demonstrate a stable frequency-locking scheme for Rydberg atomic experiments. We use the Zeeman effect to modulate the three-level ladder-type Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) signal to lock the laser frequency of the coupling light for transition from its intermediate state to a Rydberg state. The effects of polarization of the probe and coupling lights, and the amplitude of the AC modulated magnetic field B 0 on the EIT and the corresponding dispersive error signal, are both analyzed. The results show that both the EIT signal and dispersive error signal are the strongest when the polarizations of coupling and probe fields are circular and equal. The signal-to-noise ratio of the dispersive error signal increases with B 0 . The slope of the dispersive error signal increases first and then decreases with B 0 , which is related to the increase of the EIT linewidth caused by the higher B 0 . The linewidth of the laser is significantly less than 500 kHz after frequency locking, which satisfies the requirements of most experiments involving Rydberg atoms. The method proposed herein can generally be applied to any cascade system of Rydberg atoms.
We present a simple modulation-free technique to stabilize a laser frequency to the Doppler-free spectra of an atomic vapor. Polarization spectroscopy with use of a balanced polarimeter allows us to obtain a background-free dispersion signal suitable for high-speed and robust frequency stabilization. We employed the method to the 5S(1/2) F = 2 --> 5P(3/2) F' = 3 transition of 87Rb atoms. The achieved feedback bandwidth was approximately 100 kHz, and an efficient suppression of the frequency noise in a laboratory environment was attained.
We demonstrate stabilization of an ultraviolet diode laser via Doppler-free spectroscopy of Ytterbium ions in a discharge. Our technique employs polarization spectroscopy, which produces a natural dispersive lineshape whose zero-crossing is largely immune to environmental drifts, making this signal an ideal absolute frequency reference for Yb+ ion trapping experiments. We stabilize an external-cavity diode laser near 369 nm for cooling Yb+ ions, using amplitude modulated polarization spectroscopy and a commercial PID feedback system. We achieve stable, low-drift locking with a standard deviation of measured laser frequency ∼ 400 kHz over 10 minutes, limited by the instantaneous linewidth of the diode laser. These results and the simplicity of our optical setup makes our approach attractive for stabilization of laser sources in atomic physics applications.
We have proposed an artificial modulation-free Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) method for laser frequency stabilization and demonstrated it via two-color polarization spectroscopy of Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) resonance in a room-temperature rubidium vapor. Due to the unique error signal profile, the conventional PDH method owns a large capture range in laser frequency locking. Here we manually construct a PDH error signal via a linear combination of polarization spectroscopies of the Rydberg EIT resonances without and with a magnetic field applied. The artificial modulation-free PDH error signal owns a subnatural linewidth dispersion curve as well as a large capture range with which we successfully stabilize the laser to an absolute atomic frequency reference in a long running time, immune to environmental fluctuation and even manmade impulse perturbation. This method can provide an absolute frequency reference based on atomic transition while keeping similar locking ability to provide corrections for frequency fluctuations over a broad bandwidth as the conventional PDH.
We present two techniques to lock a laser frequency on an atomic transition line by using an electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) signals, which give optical and electric feedback. We employed these methods to the D2 line of Rb87 atoms. Spectral characteristics of subnatural linewidth EIT allow us to improve frequency stability. By optical feedback of EIT signals, we were able to obtain locking bandwidths of 12 MHz, while frequency stability was 5×10−13 at best after 100 s of integration using a frequency modulation technique.
We report laser frequency stabilization with modulation transfer spectroscopy (MTS) on 85 Rb atoms. With both PZT (piezo-electric transducer) slow-loop feedback and current fastloop feedback to the laser head, we get a linewidth narrowing less than 5 kHz simultaneously. Laser injection to a laser diode and frequency beating with another polarization spectroscopy based stabilization setup are also employed to check the narrow linewidth property. With the help of the technique, a linewidth around kHz-level laser is obtained and pave the way for the locking of the lattice laser of ytterbium clock with transfer cavity technique. The setup can be used as a frequency reference for precise frequency control of atomic clock system.