Photonic-chip supercontinuum with tailored spectra for precision frequency metrology

Abstract

Supercontinuum generation using chip-integrated photonic waveguides is a powerful approach for spectrally broadening pulsed laser sources with very low pulse energies and compact form factors. When pumped with a mode-locked laser frequency comb, these waveguides can coherently expand the comb spectrum to more than an octave in bandwidth to enable self-referenced stabilization. However, for applications in frequency metrology and precision spectroscopy, it is desirable to not only support self-referencing, but also to generate low-noise combs with customizable broadband spectra. In this work, we demonstrate dispersion-engineered waveguides based on silicon nitride that are designed to meet these goals and enable precision optical metrology experiments across large wavelength spans. We perform a clock comparison measurement and report a clock-limited relative frequency instability of $3.8\times 10^{-15}$ at $\tau =2$ seconds between a 1550 nm cavity-stabilized reference laser and NIST's calcium atomic clock laser at 657 nm using a two-octave waveguide-supercontinuum comb.

References in corpus (4)

• An octave spanning mid-infrared frequency comb generated in a silicon nanophotonic wire waveguide
• Self-referenced frequency combs using high-efficiency silicon-nitride waveguides
• A transportable strontium optical lattice clock
• Dispersion engineered silicon nitride waveguides by geometrical and refractive-index optimization

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• Quasi-phase-matched supercontinuum-generation in photonic waveguides
• Optical nonlinearities of excitons in monolayer MoS2
• Supercontinuum generation assisted by dispersive waves trapping in dispersion-managed integrated silicon waveguides
• Classical and Quantum Frequency Combs for Satellite-based Clock Synchronization