Tunable rubidium excited state Voigt atomic optical filter.

A tunable rubidium excited state Voigt atomic optical filter working at optical communication wavelength (1.5 μm) is realized. The filter achieves a peak transmittance of 57.6% with a double-peak structure, in which each one has a bandwidth of 600 MHz. Benefiting from the Voigt type structure, the magnetic field of the filter can be tuned from 0 to 1600 gauss, and a peak transmittance tunability of 1.6 GHz can thus be realized. Different from the excited state Faraday type filter, the pump efficiency in the Voigt filter is affected a lot by the pump polarization. Measured absorption results of the pump laser and transmittances of the signal laser both prove that the vertical linear polarization pumping is the most efficient in the Voigt filter.