Abstract
We describe a study, performed using heterodyne techniques, of the frequency fluctuations of two completely independent ring dye lasers locked to independent reference cavities. Single laser linewidths of less than 750 Hz were achieved, the principal limitation being residual vibrations from the noisy laboratory environment. With future design and environmental improvements, ultranarrow linewidths are expected thus providing a useful tool for a great variety of high precision experiments.
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References
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The Allan variance for no dead time andN=2 may be expressed as\(\sigma (\tau ) = \frac{1}{{v_0 }}\left[ {\frac{1}{{2(M - 1)}}\sum\limits_{i = 1}^{M - 1} {(v_{i + 1} - v_i )^2 } } \right]^{1/2} ,\) where υ0 is the mean optical frequency,M is the number of immediately successive frequency measurements, and υ i is thei tb heterodyne frequency measurement after counting during an interval τ
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