We demonstrate a tunable wavelength-locked seed laser source with high-frequency stability to realize the precise measurements of global atmospheric wind field. An Nd:YAG laser at 1 064 nm is used as the master laser (ML). Its frequency is locked to a confocal Fabry-Perot interferometer by using the Pound-Drever- Hall method, which ensures the peak-to-peak value of its frequency drifts less than 180 kHz over 2 h. Another Nd:YAG laser at 1 064 nm, as the slave laser, is offset-locked to the above ML using optical phase locked loop, retaining virtually the same absolute frequency stability as the ML. The tunable ranges of the frequency differences between two lasers are up to 3 GHz, and the tuning step length was an arbitrary integral multiple of 200 kHz. The researched seed laser source is compact and robust, which can well satisfy the requirement of the Doppler wind lidar.
We measure the transmission characteristics of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber(HC-PCF) gas cells with ferrule- and fusion-spliced configurations, and near- and far-field images of the HC-PCF are observed.Results show that the center of mass(COM) of the far-field image varies with the laser frequency and temperature, and the moving COM relates to the oscillatory transmission. Using a model of the spatial interference, we first demonstrate that mainly the modes with asymmetric phase distributions affect the COM position. The frequency stabilization performances of the lasers are compared. The fusion-spliced gas cell shows better performance than the ferrule-spliced one.
We demonstrate a method for further reducing the cavity linewidth by the application of a small longitudinal magnetic field on the Rb cell. Because of the magnetic field multiple electromagnetically induced transparencies(EITs) are observed. The center EIT linewidth is measured as a function of the magnetic field. By utilizing the center EIT we narrow the cavity linewidth to 2 MHz which is half of the cavity linewidth without magnetic field.
