Simple vibration insensitive cavity for laser stabilization at the 10^{-16} level

Abstract

We present the design and realization of two reference cavities for ultra-stable lasers addressing narrow transitions in mixed-species (In+ / Yb+) Coulomb crystals. With a simple setup, we achieve a fractional frequency instability close to the thermal noise limit of a 12 cm long cavity, reaching 4.7 * 10^{-16} at 10 s with a linear drift of 53 mHz/s. We discuss the individual instability contributions and show that in a setup with a lower thermal noise floor and vibration sensitivity, an instability of 1 * 10^{-16} can be reached. To achieve this, we implement a vibration insensitive design for a 30 cm long cavity mounted horizontally and conduct first tests that show a sensitivity of 1.8 * 10^{-11} / ms^{-2} to vertical accelerations. This is about a factor of 20 less than the value observed for the short cavity. Mechanical tolerances and ways to further reduce the sensitivity are discussed.

8 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Compact, thermal-noise-limited optical cavity for diode laser stabilization at 1 x 10-15
• Comparison of Two Independent Sr Optical Clocks with 1e-17 Stability at 10^3 s
• Tuning the Thermal Expansion Properties of Optical Reference Cavities with Fused Silica Mirrors
• A high-precision rf trap with minimized micromotion for an In+ multiple-ion clock
• Reducing the effect of thermal noise in optical cavities

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• Coherent excitation of the highly forbidden electric octupole transition in ${}^{172}$Yb${}^{+}$
• 946-nm Nd:YAG digital-locked laser at $1.1\times 10^{-16}$ in 1 s and transfer-locked to a cryogenic silicon cavity
• Optical techniques for Rydberg physics in lattice geometries
• Characterization of the long-term dimensional stability of a NEXCERA block using the optical resonator technique
• Impact of Earth's gravity on Gaussian beam propagation in hemispherical cavities