Broadband low-noise photodetector for Pound-Drever-Hall laser stabilization

Abstract

The Pound-Drever-Hall laser stabilization technique requires a fast, low-noise photodetector. We present a simple photodetector design that uses a transformer as an intermediary between a photodiode and cascaded low-noise radio-frequency amplifiers. Our implementation using a silicon photodiode yields a detector with 50 MHz bandwidth, gain $>10^5$ V/A, and input current noise $<4$ pA/$\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$, allowing us to obtain shot-noise-limited performance with low optical power.

submitted to Review of Scientific Instruments

Cited by in corpus (1)

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