A digitally generated ultrafine optical frequency comb for spectral measurements with 0.01-pm resolution and 0.7-µs response time

Yuan Bao; Xingwen Yi; Zhaohui Li; Qingming Chen; Jianping Li; Xudong Fan; Xuming Zhang

doi:10.1038/lsa.2015.73

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A digitally generated ultrafine optical frequency comb for spectral measurements with 0.01-pm resolution and 0.7-µs response time

Original Articles

- A digitally generated ultrafine optical frequency comb for spectral measurements with 0.01-pm resolution and 0.7-µs response time
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 4, Issue 3, (2015)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
  2.School of Communication and Information Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology, Chengdu 610051, China
  3.The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen 518057, China
  4.Biomedical Engineering Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA
  5.Department of Applied Physics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong S.A.R., China
- Author bio：
  
  ZH Li, Email: li_zhaohui@hotmail.com
  XM Zhang, Email: apzhang@polyu.edu.hk
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/lsa.2015.73
  CLC：
- Published：2015-09，
  
  Published Online：12 March 2015，
  
  Received：09 October 2014，
  
  Revised：24 February 2015，
  
  Accepted：12 March 2015
- Accepted：
Scan QR Code
Bao, Y. et al. A digitally generated ultrafine optical frequency comb for spectral measurements with 0.01-pm resolution and 0.7-µs response time. Light: Science & Applications, 4, e300 (2015).
DOI：

Bao, Y. et al. A digitally generated ultrafine optical frequency comb for spectral measurements with 0.01-pm resolution and 0.7-µs response time. Light: Science & Applications, 4, e300 (2015). DOI： 10.1038/lsa.2015.73.

摘要

Abstract

Optical spectral measurements are crucial for optical sensors and many other applications

but the prevailing methods

such as optical spectrum analysis and tunable laser spectroscopy

often have to make compromises among resolution

speed

and accuracy. Optical frequency combs are widely used for metrology of discrete atomic and molecular spectral lines. However

they are usually generated by optical methods and have large comb spacing

which limits the resolution for direct sampling of continuous spectra. To overcome these problems

this paper presents an original method to digitally generate an ultrafine optical frequency comb (UFOFC) as the frequency ruler for spectral measurements. Each comb line provides one sampling point

and the full spectrum can be captured at the same time using coherent detection. For an experimental demonstration

we adopted the inverse fast Fourier transform to generate a UFOFC with a comb spacing of 1.46 MHz over a 10-GHz range and demonstrated its functions using a Mach-Zehnder refractive index sensor. The UFOFC obtains a spectral resolution of 0.01 pm and response time of 0.7 μs; both represent 100-fold improvements over the state of the art and could be further enhanced by several orders of magnitude. The UFOFC presented here could facilitate new label-free sensor applications that require both high resolution and fast speed

such as measuring binding kinetics and single-molecule dynamics.

关键词

Keywords

coherent detectiondigital signal processoptical frequency combsoptical sensorsoptical spectrometry

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