High-resolution spectroscopy of arbitrary light sources using frequency combs

Abstract

Multiheterodyne techniques using frequency combs -- light sources whose lines are perfectly evenly-spaced -- have revolutionized optical science. By beating an unknown signal with the many lines of a comb, its spectrum is recovered. However, these techniques have been restricted to measuring coherent sources, such as lasers. In this work, we demonstrate a new multiheterodyne technique that allows for nearly any complex broadband spectrum to be retrieved using a comb. Two versions are introduced: a delayed comb technique that uses a tunable delay element, and a dual comb technique that uses a second comb. In each case, the spectrum of the source is recovered by Fourier transforming the correlation between two spectrograms. This approach is statistical in nature and is general to nearly any source (coherent or incoherent), allowing for the entire spectrum to be rapidly measured with high resolution.

9 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Frequency comb spectroscopy
• Microresonator Soliton Dual-Comb Spectroscopy
• Adaptive real-time dual-comb spectroscopy
• Vernier spectrometer using counter-propagating soliton microcombs
• Computational coherent averaging for free-running dual-comb spectroscopy
• In-phase and anti-phase synchronization in a laser frequency comb
• Photonic chip-based soliton frequency combs covering the biological imaging window
• Phase Steps and Hot Resonator Detuning in Microresonator Frequency Combs