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Abstract Kerr microcombs have drawn substantial interest as mass-manufacturable, compact alternatives to bulk frequency combs. This could enable the deployment of many comb-reliant applications previously confined to laboratories. Particularly enticing is the prospect of microcombs performing optical frequency division in compact optical atomic clocks. Unfortunately, it is difficult to meet the self-referencing requirement of microcombs in these systems owing to the approximately terahertz repetition rates typically required for octave-spanning comb generation. In addition, it is challenging to spectrally engineer a microcomb system to align a comb mode with an atomic clock transition with a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. Here we adopt a Vernier dual-microcomb scheme for optical frequency division of a stabilized ultranarrow-linewidth continuous-wave laser at 871 nm to an ~235 MHz output frequency. This scheme enables shifting an ultrahigh-frequency (~100 GHz) carrier-envelope offset beat down to frequencies where detection is possible and simultaneously placing a comb line close to the 871 nm laser—tuned so that, if frequency doubled, it would fall close to the clock transition in171Yb+. Our dual-comb system can potentially combine with an integrated ion trap towards future chip-scale optical atomic clocks.
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Vernier frequency division with dual-microresonator solitons
Abstract Microresonator solitons are critical to miniaturize optical frequency combs to chip scale and have the potential to revolutionize spectroscopy, metrology and timing. With the reduction of resonator diameter, high repetition rates up to 1 THz become possible, and they are advantageous to wavelength multiplexing, coherent sampling, and self-referencing. However, the detection of comb repetition rate, the precursor to all comb-based applications, becomes challenging at these repetition rates due to the limited bandwidth of photodiodes and electronics. Here, we report a dual-comb Vernier frequency division method to vastly reduce the required electrical bandwidth. Free-running 216 GHz “Vernier” solitons sample and divide the main soliton’s repetition frequency from 197 GHz to 995 MHz through electrical processing of a pair of low frequency dual-comb beat notes. Our demonstration relaxes the instrumentation requirement for microcomb repetition rate detection, and could be applied for optical clocks, optical frequency division, and microwave photonics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1842641
- PAR ID:
- 10181800
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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