This paper is an introduction to an elegant and powerful technique in modern optics: Pound–Drever–Hall laser frequency stabilization. This introduction is primarily meant to be conceptual, but it includes enough quantitative detail to allow the reader to immediately design a real setup, suitable for research or industrial application. The intended audience is both the researcher learning the technique for the first time and the teacher who wants to cover modern laser locking in an upper-level physics or electrical engineering course.
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The Pockels cell actually modulates the laser’s phase, but the distinction between phase and frequency modulation is irrelevant for the conceptual model.
21.
The reader who doesn’t like Bessel functions will find that the small angle expansion, works just about as well.
22.
There may also be some contribution from higher order terms that we neglected when we expanded in terms of Bessel functions. These may make a significant contribution to the 2Ω term, but we do not need to consider them in this tutorial.
23.
J. B. Camp, H. Yamamoto, S. E. Whitcomb, and D. E. McClelland, “Analysis of Light Noise Sources in a Recycled Michelson Interferometer with Fabry–Perot Arms,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A (to be published).
24.
You can get around this quantum limit to some extent by squeezing the light, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
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T. T. Lyons, M. W. Regehr, and F. J. Raab. “Shot Noise in Gravitational-Wave Detectors with Fabry–Perot Arms” (unpublished).
26.
The shot noise limit does depend implicitly on the power in the sidebands, since but this is a relatively minor effect.
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© 2001 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2001
American Association of Physics Teachers
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