Optical frequency combs allow scientists to measure light — and our world — with great precision and accuracy. This device has led to innovations that scientists never imagined when it was created.
Credit: J. Wang/NIST
An improvement to a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a frequency comb enables it to measure light pulse arrival times with greater sensitivity than was previously possible — potentially improving measurements of distance along with applications such as precision timing and atmospheric sensing.
The innovation, created by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), represents a new way of using frequency comb technology, which the scientists have termed a “time programmable frequency comb.” Up until now, frequency comb lasers needed to create light pulses with metronomic regularity to achieve their effects, but the NIST team has shown that manipulating the timing of the pulses can help frequency combs make accurate measurements under a broader set of conditions than has been possible.
“We’ve essentially broken this rule of frequency combs that demands they use a fixed pulse spacing for precision operation,” said Laura Sinclair, a physicist at NIST’s Boulder campus and one of the paper’s authors. “By changing how we control frequency combs, we have gotten rid of the trade-offs we had to make, so now we can get high-precision results even if our system only has a little light to work with.”
The team’s work is described in the journal Nature.
Often described as a ruler for light, a frequency comb is a type of laser whose light consists of many well-defined frequencies that can be measured accurately. ..
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