Frequency stabilization of a 1083 nm fiber laser to 4He transition lines with optical heterodyne saturation spectroscopies

Abstract

Two kinds of optical heterodyne saturation spectroscopies, namely, frequency modulation spectroscopy (FMS) and modulation transfer spectroscopy (MTS), are demonstrated for locking a fiber laser to the transition lines of metastable 4He atoms around 1083 nm. The servo-loop error signals of FMS and MTS for stabilizing laser frequency are optimized by studying the dependence of the peak-to-peak amplitude and slope on the optical power of pump and probe beams. A comparison of the stabilization performances of FMS/MTS and polarization spectroscopy (PS) is presented, which shows that MTS exhibits relatively superior performance with the least laser frequency fluctuation due to its flat-background dispersive signal, originated from the four-wave mixing process. The Allan deviation of the stabilized laser frequency is 5.4 × 10-12@100 s with MTS for data acquired in 1000 s, which is sufficiently applicable for fields like laser cooling, optical pumping, and optical magnetometry. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.