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G. A. Kazakov, Thorsten Schumm:
"Active optical frequency standards with trapped atoms: approaches and difficulties";
Poster: 33th SFB meeting, Innsbruck; 2016-07-14 - 2016-07-15.

Bad cavity laser is a laser where the linewidth of the cavity mode is broader than the gain profile. Frequency of radiation emitted by such laser is robust with respect to fluctuations of the cavity length. It opens the possibility to create a highly stable active optical frequency standard. Theoretical estimations shows that such bad-cavity lasers may have milliherz-narrow linewidth. Being combined with high-precision passive optical clocks in the manner similar to combination of hydrogen masers and Cs beam clocks in national metrology institutions, these lasers may constitute an ultra-high performance frequency reference.

Creation of such a bad-cavity lasers faces a number of challenges related to collisions, escape of the atoms out of the trapping potential, necessity of pumping, etc. Also the lasers may operate in unstable regimes, where the amplitude of the output radiation demonstrate complex temporal pattern. We discuss different approaches towards the construction of the bad cavity active optical frequency standards. Also, we present an efficient method for analysis of stability of lasers with inhomogeneously broadened gain, and investigate steady-state solutions and their stability for bad cavity lasers with spin-1/2 atoms.

Bad cavity laser, realization, trapped atoms, theory, stability

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_253095.pdf