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IEEE photonics journal

Stabilizing Electro-Optic Modulation Depth With Carrier to Sideband Ratio by Intermediate Optical Beatings

Jie Wang, Guochao Wang, Yaning Wang, Mei Hu, Xiaoyan Yu, Mingyue Yang, Xu Zhang, Huankai Zhang, Aiai Jia, Lingxiao Zhu, Shuhua Yan, Jun Jie Yang

Published Oct 20, 2021• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Electro-optic modulation with a constant modulation depth plays important roles in quantum metrology, microwave photonics, and optical precision measurement and sensing, etc. To compensate the continuous drift of the half-wave voltage and maintain the modulation depth, we incidentally generated a reference laser to make intermedia optical beatings with the carrier and +1st sideband, and tightly locked the carrier to sideband ratio by extracting the relative microwave power of those intermedia beat signals using a home-made electronic control module. Experiments of the short-term test for locking bandwidth, the anti-jamming capability, and the long-term stability were demonstrated. As is verified that, the locking bandwidth was estimated up to tens of kHz, and the anti-jamming capability was confirmed despite of a strong hair-dryer agitation. The long-term stability for the modulation depth stabilization showed that the peak-to-peak relative stability for 150-minute was 5.67 × 10−6, and the Allan deviation reached a minimum of 2.19 × 10−7at an averaging time of 400 s, which is improved by more than four orders of magnitude compared with the open-loop regime. We believe the reported method as well as the designed module is versatile and potential to precision measurement and sensing applications badly requiring a stable modulation depth, such as atom interferometry, optical interferometry and lidar detection.

DOI
10.1109/jphot.2021.3120807

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Electro-optic modulation with a constant modulation depth plays important roles in quantum metrology, microwave photonics, and optical precision measurement and sensing, etc. To compensate the continuous drift of the half-wave voltage and maintain the modulation depth, we incidentally generated a reference laser to make intermedia optical beatings with the carrier and +1st sideband, and tightly locked the carrier to sideband ratio by extracting the relative microwave power of those intermedia beat signals using a home-made electronic control module. Experiments of the short-term test for locking bandwidth, the anti-jamming capability, and the long-term stability were demonstrated. As is verified that, the locking bandwidth was estimated up to tens of kHz, and the anti-jamming capability was confirmed despite of a strong hair-dryer agitation. The long-term stability for the modulation depth stabilization showed that the peak-to-peak relative stability for 150-minute was 5.67 × 10−6, and the Allan deviation reached a minimum of 2.19 × 10−7at an averaging time of 400 s, which is improved by more than four orders of magnitude compared with the open-loop regime. We believe the reported method as well as the designed module is versatile and potential to precision measurement and sensing applications badly requiring a stable modulation depth, such as atom interferometry, optical interferometry and lidar detection.
We present an all-digital method for stabilizing the phase biases in an electro-optic I/Q modulator for carrier-suppressed single-sideband (CS-SSB) modulation. Using programmable logic on the Red Pitaya STEMlab 125-14 platform, we digitally generate and demodulate an auxiliary radio-frequency tone whose beat with the optical carrier probes the I/Q modulator’s phase imbalances. We implement a multiple-input, multiple-output integral feedback controller that accounts for unavoidable cross-couplings in the phase biases to lock the error signals at exactly zero, where optical power fluctuations have no impact on phase stability. We demonstrate >23dB suppression of the optical carrier relative to the desired sideband at +3.4GHz over a period of 15 h and over temperature variations of 20°C.
Phase modulation of light plays a key role in modern-day optical communication and processing systems. For this purpose, electro-optic phase modulators are indispensable because of their unique operational flexibility in manipulating the output light signal and providing a large modulation bandwidth. We propose a characterization of the performance of a non-resonant electro-optic phase modulator using what we believe to be a novel quantum-interference-based method. The evaluation is done to study (i) sideband generation, (ii) V π voltage, (iii) modulation parameter, and (iv) capability to introduce controlled phase noise in the system. Electromagnetically induced absorption, a product of constructive quantum interference, is used to study the above-mentioned aspects. These results are compared with those obtained from scanning Fabry–Perot Etalon fringes. In the case of a non-resonant modulator, the efficiency of analysis based on electromagnetically induced absorption is proved to be better than that of Etalon fringe analysis. The result of the noise through the phase modulator in the atom-field system is cross-verified with the resulting heterodyne beat signal obtained between two similar external cavity lasers (free-running, passive stabilization using an extra layer of thermal and vibrational isolation), where one of them is quieter than the other and experiences the introduction of noise through the electro-optic phase modulator.
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.
Phase-coherent multi-tone lasers play a critical role in atomic, molecular, and optical physics.Among them, the Raman opeartion laser for manipulating atomic hyperfine qubits requires gigahertz bandwidth and low phase noise to retain long-term coherence.Raman operation lasers generated by directly modulated and frequency-multipled infrared lasers are compact and stable but lack feedback control to actively suppress the phase noise, which limits their performance in practical applications.In this work, we employ a fiber electro-optical modulator driven by a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to modulate a monochromatic laser and employ a second-harmonic generation process to convert it to the visible domain, where the beat note of the Raman operation laser is stabilized by controlling the output frequency of VCO with a digital phase-locked loop (PLL).The low-frequency phase noise is effectively suppressed compared to the scheme without active feedback and it reaches -80 dBc=Hz@5 kHz with a 20 kHz loop bandwidth.Furthermore, this compact and robust scheme effectively reduces the system's complexity and cost, which is promising for extensive application in atomic, molecular, and optical physics.
Monitoring and stabilizing the power ratio of laser pairs is significant for high-precision atom interferometers, especially as the compact electro-optic-modulated all-fiber laser system prevails. In this Letter, we demonstrate a novel, to the best of our knowledge, method to in situ probe the relative power of laser pairs and to stabilize the power ratio of two Raman lasers using a high-dispersion virtually imaged phased array (VIPA) etalon. Sub-microsecond resolution on probing laser power transformation during the atom interferometer sequence is achieved and the power ratio of two Raman lasers (PRTR) is tightly locked with high bandwidth despite environmental disturbances, showing an Allan deviation of 4.39 × 10−5 at 1000 s averaging time. This method provides a novel way to stabilize the PRTR and diagnose multi-frequency laser systems for atom interferometers, and it could find potential applications in broad quantum sensing scenarios.
Differential light shift (DLS) is an important error term that limits the atom interferometer's measurement precision, especially for the case of the electro-optic modulator (EOM)-based scheme, where multiple laser sidebands exist, and their ratios are hard to control synchronously. This article carried out an experimental and theoretical study on this subject. By conducting long-term gravity measurement, we find that the gravity exhibits drifts of about 13.13 μGal, and is strongly correlated to the Raman laser's sidebands. A model of the DLS-induced gravity error is established and a DLS compensation method is proposed to suppress the gravity drift to 2.54 μGal. Besides the compensation method, we propose a Dual-Sideband Ratio Locking scheme to more robustly eliminate the gravity measurement drift. By feeding back to both the EOM microwave power and the tapered amplifier's temperature, this method locks both the ±1 order sideband to a stability level of 10-5, which corresponds to a gravity error of less than 0.1 μGal. Long-term gravity measurement is carried out after the locking method, showing a long-term stability of 1.6 μGal. The proposed methods will benefit the suppression of the DLS effect for high-precision atom interference measurement.