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Optica Publishing Group
  • International Conference on Quantum Electronics
  • OSA Technical Digest (Optica Publishing Group, 1988),
  • paper MM2

Toward the Ultimate Laser-Spectroscopic Resolution

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Abstract

The laser pioneers were appropriately the ones first to observe sub-Doppler resonance structure in the output power of a gas laser. Szoke and Javaa1 used the dip to measure the isotope shift of the Ne transition, while Bennett and his collaborators2 gave a physical explanation of the effect in terms of the now-familiar "holes" burned into the velocity distribution. The theory of Lamb3 was brand new and indicated the relationship of the dip width to the natural atomic linewidth. The rush toward high resolution began in earnest with the classic paper4 of Lee and Skolnick who reminded us that the resonance medium and the laser medium can be distinct and separate: low pressure Ne vs HeNe in their case. The introduction5,6 of saturated absorption molecular spectroscopy in 1968 led rapidly to resonance linewidths decreasing from 500 to below 1 kHz, as physical understanding of the broadening mechanisms – natural broadening, collisions, power broadening, transit broadening7, Zeeman splitting, hyperfine structure8, and recoil spectral doubling9 – was matched by appropriate technical advances. (The now widely-used Iodine-stabilized visble laser was introduced in this time frame by Hanes and Dahlstrom10, but its large natural linewidth excludes it as a competitor in the high resolution sweepstakes.) Perhaps the most important technical advance historically was the introduction into the optical domain of rf techniques such as phase/frequency locking3 which make it possible to scan a test laser relative to a stable source. In this way we can thus isolate the two goals: the first of achieving high stability in a practical device, and the second, the scientist's important preference for operating conditions which simplify and facilitate physical understanding. The accidental overlap of CH4 absorption with the He-Ne 3.39 μm laser was initially welcome in this work, but eventually came to be regarded as constraining since people variously wanted to work with other absorbing molecules of high intrinsic interest – OsO4 and SF6 at 10 μm for example11– or wanted to have the general tunability of dye lasers in the visible domain – for Hydrogen spectroscopy12 for example – while retaining the ultraprecise tuning capability offered by frequency offset locking techniques. One may gather correctly that this mixture of desireable characteristics has been a very long time in coming together, from an early paper on active stabilization of a dye laser13 in 1973 to the new results reported later in this conference of an external "Magic Box" which can take the output beam of a commercial dye laser, with its several MHz spectral width, and deliver 3/4 of the output power as a pure optical sinewave of sub-Hz linewidth.

© 1988 Optical Society of America

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