OSE Seminars
Intracavity Nonlinear Spectroscopy, technical issues, and scientific opportunities
Presented by Professor John L. Hall, Nobel Laureate
Cavity-Enhanced Spectroscopy by its coherent field build-up transforms a few ppm absorption into some percents of changed transmission, and organizes our interaction with free-flying molecules such that most interactions with the probing light lead to a detected change in the observed light, and so yields the maximal S/N. The precision has been limited by technical issues (mainly Residual Amplitude Modulation (RAM) parasitically produced in the phase modulation process), but with the RAM-Buster© we now can accurately suppress this locking offset to sub-ppm levels. Think 1 Hz laser linewidth in the optical domain, with 1 Hz stability at 1 s averaging, AND with 1 Hz optical frequency reproducibility.
So with vibration-insensitive cavity design, one is looking at a lunch-box-sized replacement for the best currently-commercial quantum oscillator, the Hydrogen maser. Micro-resonator-based combs then offer the conversion of equivalent performance, converted to the rf domain. A sensitive experiment in varying gravity to compare a light-pulse cavity-clock with the quantum clock will be a delicious test of Einstein's Equivalence Principle.
10:00 am, Friday, May 6, 2016
Room 103, Center for High Tech Materials
Science and Technology Park - South Campus
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A schedule of talks within the Department of Physics and Astronomy is available on the P&A web site at http://physics.unm.edu/pandaweb/events/index.php