《An introduction to Pound–Drever–Hall laser frequency stabilization》.pdf

An introduction to Pound–Drever–Hall laser frequency stabilization Eric D. Black LIGO Project, California Institute of Technology, Mail Code 264-33, Pasadena, California 91125 Received 3 January 2000; accepted 4 April 2000 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. © 2001 American Association of Physics Teachers. DOI: 10.1119/1.1286663 I. INTRODUCTION materials on both control theory and Fabry–Perot cavities, see Refs. 13–17. An excellent introduction to interferometric Pound–Drever–Hall laser frequency stabilization is a gravitational-wave detectors is Ref. 18. powerful technique for improving an existing laser’s fre- quency stability,1,2 and it is an essential part of the technol- II. A CONCEPTUAL MODEL ogy of interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.3 The technique has been used to demonstrate, using a commercial Suppose we have a laser that we want to use for some laser, a frequency standard as relatively stable as a pulsar.4,5 experiment, but we need better frequency stability than the The physical basis of the Pound–Drever–H