We report the operation of a
87Rb maser in the self-oscillating mode, using a laser diode as the optical pumping source. The maser uses a TE
021 cavity surrounding a cell containing the atoms and 11 Torr of N
2 as the buffer gas. The optical pumping is accomplished by using a commercial laser diode frequency-locked on the linear absorption line of an external rubidium cell. The maser output power is maximized when the laser spectrum is spread by modulating its frequency through the variation of its injection current. The maser output power is also presented for various modulation waveforms and frequencies. We find that the spurious sidebands induced by the modulation can be minimized. Finally, the linear dependence between the laser and maser frequencies is shown. We find that the relative maser frequency pulling from the laser is about
4.6×10−3.
Recently we reported the operation of an optically pumped 85Rb maser oscillating at 3.035734 GHz on the field-independent transition 52S1/2(F = 3, mF = 0 → F = 2, mF = 0) [1]. Apart from cavity pulling, the two major sources of frequency shifts are those due to the buffer gas and the pumping light. The short-term phase stability of the standard is not appreciably affected by these shifts. The buffer-gas shift can be used to advantage to select an output frequency that is different from the ground-state hyperfine frequency.