Ultrastable lasers based on vibration insensitive cavities

TL;DR

This paper introduces two ultra-stable laser systems using vibration insensitive cavities with innovative designs and fused silica mirrors, achieving record stability levels suitable for precision applications.

Contribution

The authors develop and demonstrate two novel vibration insensitive cavity designs with fused silica mirrors, significantly reducing vibration sensitivity and thermal noise for ultra-stable lasers.

Findings

Vibration sensitivity components are ≤1.5e-11 per m.s^-2.

At least one laser achieves stability better than 5.6e-16 at 1 second.

Designs eliminate the need for fine tuning of support points.

Abstract

We present two ultra-stable lasers based on two vibration insensitive cavity designs, one with vertical optical axis geometry, the other horizontal. Ultra-stable cavities are constructed with fused silica mirror substrates, shown to decrease the thermal noise limit, in order to improve the frequency stability over previous designs. Vibration sensitivity components measured are equal to or better than 1.5e-11 per m.s^-2 for each spatial direction, which shows significant improvement over previous studies. We have tested the very low dependence on the position of the cavity support points, in order to establish that our designs eliminate the need for fine tuning to achieve extremely low vibration sensitivity. Relative frequency measurements show that at least one of the stabilized lasers has a stability better than 5.6e-16 at 1 second, which is the best result obtained for this length of cavity.