Cavity-immune features in the spectra of superradiant crossover laser pulses

Abstract

Lasing in the bad cavity regime has promising applications in precision metrology due to the reduced sensitivity to cavity noise. Here we investigate the spectral properties and phase behavior of pulsed lasing on the ${}^1$S${}_0{-}^3$P${}_1$ line of ${}^{88}$Sr in a mK thermal ensemble, as first described in arxiv:1903.12593. The system operates in a regime where the Doppler-broadened atomic transition linewidth is several times larger than the cavity linewidth. We find that by detuning the cavity resonance, the influence of the cavity noise on the peak lasing frequency can be eliminated to first order despite the system not being deep in the bad cavity regime. Experimental results are compared to a model based on a Tavis-Cummings Hamiltonian, which enables us to investigate the interplay between different thermal velocity classes as the underlying mechanism for the reduction in cavity noise. These velocity-dependent dynamics can occur in pulsed lasing and during the turn-on behavior of lasers in the superradiant crossover regime.

9 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (6)

• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
• Optical frequency ratio of a ${}^{171}{\mathrm{Yb}}^{+}$ single-ion clock and a ${}^{87}\mathrm{Sr}$ lattice clock
• Rugged mHz-Linewidth Superradiant Laser Driven by a Hot Atomic Beam
• Active optical frequency standard using sequential coupling of atomic ensembles
• A strontium optical lattice clock with $1\times 10^{-17}$ uncertainty and measurement of its absolute frequency
• Space-borne Gravitational Wave Observatories

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• Fully Collective Superradiant Lasing with Vanishing Sensitivity to Cavity Length Vibrations
• Collective emission of an atomic beam into an off-resonant cavity mode
• A superradiant two-level laser with intrinsic light force generated gain
• Robustness of the Floquet-assisted superradiant phase and possible laser operation
• Quantifying the breakdown of the rotating-wave approximation in single-photon superradiance