Polarization purity for active stabilization of diode laser injection lock

Abstract

Injection locking of diode lasers is commonly used to amplify low power laser light, but is extremely sensitive to perturbations in the laser current and temperature. To counter such perturbations, active stabilization is often applied to the current of the injection locked diode. We observe that the diode laser's polarization extinction ratio (PER) greatly increases when injection locked, and therefore the PER provides a measure of injection lock quality. We report robust active stabilization of a diode laser injection lock based on the PER, demonstrating the technique at 399 nm wavelength where injection locking is typically less stable than at longer wavelengths. The PER provides a feedback error signal that is compatible with standard PID servo controllers, requires no additional optical components beyond the optical isolator typically used in injection locking, and enables a large feedback bandwidth.

arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Injection locking of a high power ultraviolet laser diode for laser cooling of ytterbium atoms
• Active Stabilization of a Diode Laser Injection Lock
• Optical injection and spectral filtering of high-power UV laser diodes
• Cavity probe for real-time detection of atom dynamics in an optical lattice
• Extended cavity diode lasers with tracked resonances

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Monitoring and active stabilization of laser injection locking using beam ellipticity