Frequency and amplitude stabilized terahertz quantum cascade laser as local oscillator

• Main Authors: Ren, Y. (Author), Hayton, D. J. (Author), Hovenier, J. N. (Author), Cui, M. (Author), Gao, J. R. (Author), Klapwijk, T. M. (Author), Shi, S. C. (Author), Kao, Tsung-Yu (Contributor), Hu, Q. (Author), Reno, J. L. (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Institute of Physics, 2014-05-02T18:51:23Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We demonstrate an experimental scheme to simultaneously stabilize the frequency and amplitude of a 3.5 THz third-order distributed feedback quantum cascade laser as a local oscillator. The frequency stabilization has been realized using a methanol absorption line, a power detector, and a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loop. The amplitude stabilization of the incident power has been achieved using a swing-arm voice coil actuator as a fast optical attenuator, using the direct detection output of a superconducting mixer in combination with a 2nd PID loop. Improved Allan variance times of the entire receiver, as well as the heterodyne molecular spectra, are demonstrated.
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS-KNAW Joint PhD Training Programme)
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (CAS-KNAW Joint PhD Training Programme)
National Natural Science Foundation (China) (Grant 11127903)
National Natural Science Foundation (China) (Grant 10933005)
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Key Laboratory of Radio Astronomy)
European Commission (AMSTAR project RadioNet under FP7, NWO, and NATO SFP)