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Atom-referenced and stabilized soliton microcomb

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Abstract

For the applications of the frequency comb in microresonators, it is essential to obtain a fully frequency-stabilized microcomb laser source. In this study, we present a system for generating a fully atom-referenced stabilized soliton microcomb. The pump light around 1560.48 nm is locked to an ultra-low-expansion (ULE) cavity. This pump light is then frequency-doubled and referenced to the atomic transition of 87Rb. The repetition rate of the soliton microcomb is injection-locked to an atomic-clock-stabilized radio frequency (RF) source, leading to mHz stabilization at 1 s. As a result, all comb lines have been frequency-stabilized based on the atomic reference and the ULE cavity, achieving a very high precision of approximately 18 Hz at 1 s, corresponding to the frequency stability of 9.5 × 10−14. Our approach provides a fully stabilized microcomb experiment scheme with no requirement of f-2f technique, which could be easily implemented and generalized to various photonic platforms, thus paving the way towards the ultraprecise optical sources for high precision spectroscopy.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, 710119, China

    Wei-Qiang Wang, Brent E. Little, Wei Zhao & Wen-Fu Zhang

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Rui Niu, Shuai Wan, Zheng-Yu Wang, Jin Li, Zhu-Bo Wang, Ming Li, Zhen Shen, Guang-Can Guo, Chang-Ling Zou & Chun-Hua Dong

  3. CAS Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Rui Niu, Shuai Wan, Tian-Peng Hua, Zheng-Yu Wang, Jin Li, Zhu-Bo Wang, Ming Li, Zhen Shen, Yu Robert Sun, Shui-Ming Hu, Guang-Can Guo, Chang-Ling Zou & Chun-Hua Dong

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Wei-Qiang Wang, Brent E. Little, Wei Zhao & Wen-Fu Zhang

  5. Department of Chemical Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Yu Robert Sun & Shui-Ming Hu

  6. Department of Physics and Materials Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 999077, China

    Sai Tak Chu

  7. State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics and Frontiers Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yun-Feng Xiao

Authors
  1. Rui Niu
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  2. Shuai Wan
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  3. Tian-Peng Hua
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  4. Wei-Qiang Wang
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  6. Jin Li
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  8. Ming Li
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  9. Zhen Shen
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  18. Wen-Fu Zhang
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  19. Chun-Hua Dong
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Chang-Ling Zou, Yun-Feng Xiao, Wen-Fu Zhang or Chun-Hua Dong.

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Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2020YFB2205801), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12293052, 12293050, 11934012, 12104442, 12304435, and 92050109), the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (Grant No. YSBR-069), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2023M733414). Wei-Qiang Wang, and Wen-Fu Zhang acknowledge the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB24030600). This work was partially carried out at the USTC Center for Micro and Nanoscale Research and Fabrication. The authors thank Qi-Fan Yang, and Jin-Ming Cui.

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Niu, R., Wan, S., Hua, TP. et al. Atom-referenced and stabilized soliton microcomb. Sci. China Phys. Mech. Astron. 67, 224262 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-023-2234-6

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