Laser-frequency division and stabilization

A novel optical interferometric technique is proposed for stabilizing and measuring a laser frequency in terms of an rf standard. In preliminary studies, a sensitive optical dual-frequency modulation scheme allows locking a laser to an optical cavity and the cavity in turn to a radio frequency reference with a noise level of 60 × 10-3 Hz or 2 parts in 1010. In principle, the laser frequency 0 can acquire the stability of the rf standard and being locked to a high-order multiple n of the rf frequency 1 facilitates the optical-rf division 0n=1. © 1984 The American Physical Society.