Abstract

Stable single-frequency laser with narrow linewidth emission (< 500kHz), fine tunability over a few GHz and output power in the 0.1W range is required to cold atom interferometry experiments. Until now different approaches have been studied in order to fulfil all these characteristics. Single frequency high power lasers have been demonstrated with distributed feedback diode lasers and tapered extended cavity diode lasers. However, these two solutions suffer from beam quality degradation at high power. A possible alternative solution to obtain a compact and simple single frequency source with narrow linewidth and good beam quality is an optically-pumped semiconductor vertical external-cavity surface-emitting laser (OPS-VECSEL), which has already demonstrated multi watt output power in the fundamental transverse mode [1] as well as high power single frequency operation [2]. Nevertheless the majority of these works using VECSEL are focused around 1µm emission. In this work we evaluate short external-cavities VECSEL for single-frequency emission at 852nm dedicated to Cs atom spectroscopy.

© 2011 Optical Society of America