Multiheterodyne techniques using frequency combs-radiation sources whose lines are perfectly evenly-spaced-have revolutionized science. By beating sources with the many lines of a comb, their spectra are recovered. Even so, these approaches are fundamentally limited to probing coherent sources, such as lasers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrecise knowledge of a laser's wavelength is crucial for applications from spectroscopy to telecommunications. Here, we present a wavemeter that operates on the Talbot effect. Tone parameter extraction algorithms are used to retrieve the frequency of the periodic signal obtained in the sampled Talbot interferogram.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe demonstrate a computational phase correction algorithm that is able to correct for phase and timing fluctuations of arbitrary dual comb spectra. By augmenting a Kalman filter with a global search and decoupling the interferogram estimation, we show that dual comb signals having a wide range of structures can be predicted and corrected. Furthermore, we derive an upper bound for the accuracy of any self-correction technique and show that the augmented filter is capable of reaching this bound when the phase and frequency noise are bandlimited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMiniaturization of optical spectrometers has a significant practical value as it can enable compact, affordable spectroscopic systems for chemical and biological sensing applications. For many applications, the spectrometer must gather light from sources that span a wide range of emission angles and wavelengths. Here, we report a lens-free spectrometer that is simultaneously compact (<0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this work, we demonstrate all-electronically tunable terahertz quantum cascade lasers (THz QCLs) with MEMS tuner structures. A two-stage MEMS tuner device is fabricated by a commercial open-foundry process performed by the company MEMSCAP. This provides an inexpensive, rapid, and reliable approach for MEMS tuner fabrication for THz QCLs with a high-precision alignment scheme.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe demonstrate an effective mode selector design that enables a terahertz quantum cascade wire laser to have a robust single-mode operation at frequencies much lower than the gain peak. This is achieved by selectively guiding the undesired modes into a lossy session while keeping the desired lasing mode largely unperturbed. The large mode discrimination obtained by this mode selector is necessary to further extend the tuning range to the lower half of the gain curve.
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