Technical note: Extended Cavity Diode Laser in Litrow Conguration at the TRIP Facility

S. De, L. Willmann August 14, 2008

Laser diodes

We are using several Diode Lasers (DL) at wavelengths 1500.4 nm, 1130.6 nm, 667.7 nm and 659.7 nm (see Table 1) for performing atomic spectroscopy as well as for laser cooling and trapping of barium. Diode lasers are advantageous for the atomic physics research because of their size, relatively simple to use and lower in cost [3, 4]. Now a days laser diodes are available in a wide range of wavelengths and with different optical power. Such a plot for available diode lasers at different wavelengths can be found out elsewhere [2]. These diodes have unique name according to their stabilization technique or fabrication procedure in the semiconductor industry. A bare laser diode (LD) without any other stabilization mechanism is known as solitary diode. In that case one needs external cavity for stabilizing its frequency. Such a system is named as Extended Cavity Diode Laser (ECDL). Some laser diodes are frequency stabilized with a grating within a semiconductor chip and commercially available in a rather compact form, they are named as Distributed Feed Back (DFB) laser. A commercially available QFBLD-1550-20 distributed feedback diode laser (from QPhotonics, VA, USA) produces light at wavelength 1500.4 nm with a maximum output power of 17 mW. The frequency of this laser is stabilized with a grating within the semiconductor chip. The light is coupled into a single mode ber attached to the diode chip. The frequency can be changed by altering the lasers temperature or its operating current. The laser is tunable over a wide frequency range without any mode hops. A commercially available mount LM14S2 (from Thorlabs. Inc., NJ, USA) interfaces the laser in a 14 pin buttery package to the temperature and the current controller. Visible laser light is generated with the laser diodes QLD-660-80S (from QPhotonics, VA, USA) and DL3149-057 (from Thorlabs. Inc., NJ, USA) at the wavelengths 659.7 nm and 667.7 nm. For infra-red light at wavelength 1130.6 nm a laser diode LD-1120-0300-1 (from TOPTICA Photonics AG, Gr felng, Germany) is a used. The output powers are 8 mW, 5 mW and 250 mW respectively. The laser diodes are in commercially standardized packages of 5.6 mm and 9 mm diameter. They are stabilized in extended cavity diode laser conguration in home made 1

Part No. Supplier Wavelength Power (mW) Current (MHz/A) Tuning Actuator

QLD-660 -80S QPhotonics USA 659.7 nm 8

Diode lasers DL3149057 Thorlabs USA 667.7 nm 5

LD-1120 -0300-1 TOPTICA Germany 1130.6 nm 300

QFBLD -1550-20 QPhotonics USA 1500.4 nm 17

Typical frequency tuning coefcients 1200 1000 175 560 MHz/V (PZT) 500 MHz/V (PZT) 70 MHz/V (PZT)

106 21 MHz/ (thermistor)

Table 1: Characteristics of the diode lasers used in the experiments. mounting systems. The compact diode laser systems are user friendly for spectroscopy experiments because of their simplicity, size and cost [3, 4]. Detailed descriptions of grating stabilized diode lasers can be found elsewhere [?, ?]. The commercially available solitary diodes of diameter 5.6 mm or 9 mm (see Table 1) need a biasing through cathode and anode relative to a common terminal for working. Output frequency of a LD is very sensitive to both operating current and temperature. The front and back side of the diode have high reectivity due to the large dielectric constant of the semiconductor material. The reectivity is greater than 10%. The resonator cavity of a LD is built up by two opposite facet perpendicular to the semiconductor junction. The typical cavity length of a DL is on the order of 250 micon. This results typical mode spacing of the spectrum of about 120 GHz or 0.25 nm at 800 nm lasing wavelength. Changing the temperature changes band gap of the semiconductor material, which is directly related to the change in lasing frequency typically 0.10.3 nm/K, depending on diodes. Change in diode current changes carrier density in the junction and that changes refractive index of the cavity and hence changes frequency. Typically change in frequency of a LD with current is 0.01 nm/mA. We set the diode up in Extended Cavity Diode Laser (ECDL) conguration for frequency stabilizing them using an external cavity. We mount the LD and all other necessary optics in ECDL conguration on a home made mounting system (Fig. 1). Since the output of a DL is diverging, we use an aspheric lens of focal length f = 5 11 mm, very close to the diode to collimate the beam. The divergence of a DL is not symmetric in all the directions because of the shape of the laser diode facet, which is typically 10 50m. Thus the spatial extension of the collimated beam is more in one axis than the other. After the lens, we use a reection grating to diffract the laser in higher orders. The diffraction angle (m ) is proportional to wavelength of the incident light and the m-th order

Laser diode holder Laser diode

Grating Piezo

base

mounting table

Sub D-9 Female for current controller

Sub D-9 Male for temperature controller

Figure 1: Photograph of a diode laser setup in our laboratory. 3

Grating Groove normal normal -1 order diffracted Incidentl light

i r=i

0-order diffracted +1 order diffracted

d = 1/groove density p/2 blaze angle

Diffraction from a grating in Littrow configuration

Figure 2: Diffraction phenomena from a grating in Littrow conguration, which has been used for external frequency stabilization of a diode laser. diffraction equation from a grating is dsin(i) + dsin(m ) = m , (1)

where d is the distance between two consecutive grooves, i.e, d = groove1density . We stabilize the output frequency of the diode laser by feeding back the light of the -1 order into the diode. Hence we force the laser to resonate at that particular frequency that we feed back from the grating. There are many ways to build up an external cavities for DL stabilizations. We have chosen the Littrow conguration (Fig. 2). In this conguration the diffraction angle of the -1 order relative to the grating normal (1 ) is same as incident angle (i). Thus the above diffraction equation reduces to 2dsin( ) = , (2)

considering i = 1 = . Tuning the grating angle changes the effective length of the external cavity , which selects different wavelength in the diffracted beam. Thus frequency of the output laser changes accordingly. We use a piezo connected to the grating mount for homogenous tuning of the grating angle, hence it scans the frequency of the DL. There we use a low voltage piezo with an extension coefcient of d(length) 30 nm/V. d(voltage) (3)

If the lever arm of the mount on which the grating rotates freely in the plane of the laser diode base has a length l, a voltage dv applied to the piezo will produce a rotation angle d( ) = 1 d(length) d(V ). l d(voltage) (4)

In that case, the change of wavelength with changing the piezo voltage can be estimated from the grating equation, d = 2d cos( ) d( ) 1 d(length) = 2d cos( ) d(V ). l d(voltage) (5) (6)

Taking an example, that a LD at wavelength 1130 nm seated up in ECDL using a grating of 1200 lines/mm at an angle = , we get tuning of wavelength by 8 the piezo is 3.2(1) pm/V or 0.75(2) GHz/V at wavelength 1130 nm. The loose end of this conguration is, changing angle of the grating changes the pointing of the diffracted zero order beam. Over one meter distance from the DL the pointing changes typically few ten micron for scanning over a range of 30 MHz. Since for spectroscopic purpose we scan the laser by some 20 30 MHz, change of the pointing of the laser does not affect the experiment that much. That is why we have chosen Littrow conguration other that Littman-Metcalf conguration, where pointing does not change while scanning the laser by angle tuning of the grating. At the cost of the available output power from the diode laser for doing experiment, the choice of the grating with respect to the angle between grating normal and the groove normal (blaze angle,B ) is important. Commercial grating are characterized by groove density, i.e., number of grooves/mm (n) and by blaze angle. The blaze angle affects the diffraction efciency of the grating at any wavelength. For a particular order, the diffraction angle only depends on and on d, which is inversely proportional to n. The relative position of the LD and the grating is such that one likes to have the rst order diffraction angle close to 45o , so that the light coming out from the LD os not blocked by the diode laser holder (Fig. 6). That means, the zero order reected light from the grating on the order of 90o relative to the incident light. In this conguration we only have 0-th order and -1 order after diffraction, thus we do not loose power into the other diffraction modes. The diffraction efciency from a grating depends on total number of illuminated grooves and on the polarization of the incident light. Thus commonly people use the minor axis of the laser beam cross-section aligned parallel to the grooves of the grating. The output of the diode laser is polarized in the direction parallel to the semiconductor junction of the diode, hence along the narrow dimension of the spatial mode. From the denition of the polarization the light incident on grating is s-polarized. In the Fig. 3, we show polarization dependent diffraction efciency for the light of wavelength at 1100 nm on a 1200 lines/mm grating with different blaze angle. In a grating stabilized diode laser the feedback from the grating has to be larger than the light reected back from the facet of the diode itself. In practice 20 30% feedback from the grating is sufcient for infrared lasers and some higher percentage, up to 50%, at the visible wavelength. Here the advantage of the Anti Reection (AR) coated laser diode facets are clear, because then less feedback from the grating would be needed. In Fig. 3, we see that s-polarization have always more diffraction efciency than the p-polarization. One has to choose a grating so that 5

Figure 3: Polarization dependent absolute diffraction efciency of ruled gratings with xed number rulings per cm (1200 linem/mm) but blaze for different wavelengths. there is sufcient power available into the -1 order beam for the stabilization. On the other hand one can use a half wave plate to rotate the polarization to make the standard Littrow conguration simple, one can choose a right grating depending on wavelength to make the system reasonably efcient. An example of the choice of the grating for a laser at 1100 nm wavelength is 1200 lines/mm. This corresponds to the rst diffraction order at an angle of 42o . A grating which is blazed for 400 nm would be appropriate. Now we are moving to some more detail on the electrical connections for running the DL. We connect the current controller and the temperature controller to the diode laser through the male sub D-15 connecter mounted in the diode laser mounting table. We use cables of different colors for different types of diodes to connect the three pins of a commercially brought solitary diode to the sub D-15 connector xed on the diode laser table. There are two different types of diodes available, anode ground (AG) and cathode ground (CG) types. Sometimes there is a photodiode (PD) connected with the laser diode, which measures the emitted light power from the diode. Since they are also diodes, they can be two different types AG and CG. So, in total there are six different combinations possible between different types of LD and PD. We use unique color codes of the wires connecting the diodes and the sub D-15 connectors for identifying them easily. That allows to select the mode (AG or CG) of the current controller without touching the diodes every time. The female sub D-15 mainly provides connection of the current controller to

Figure 4: Color code of the wires we use in our lab for connecting different types of commercially available TO-3 type laser diode to the female sub D-15 connector mounted on the diode laser mounting table. (a), (b), (c) laser diodes are for cathode ground (CG) type and (d), (e), (f) are for anode ground (AG) type. the LD and the TEC cooler connection to the peltier element. There is s red LED in the female sub D-15 connector which glows only when the LD is switched on and also there is a green LED which glow up when the LD is broken. The protection diode connected between pin-4 and pin-10 protects the LD from any large current ow through the diode due to any accidental short circuit. The connections are shown in Fig. 6(a). A special cable has been made, which connects the temperature controller (KVI, custom design or TED 200C, Thorlabs) through a male sub D-9 and also connects the current supply (LDC 200, LDC 500, Thorlabs) through the other female sub D-9 connector. The sub D-9 connectors has been chosen to be compatible with commercial available temperature and current controllers, for example temperature and current controllers from Thorlabs Ins. Other side of the cable has a male sub D-15 connector for making the connection to the female sub D-15 attached to the DL mounting table. The pin connection of the custom cable is given in Table 3. A 4 wire LEMO cable is needed for connecting the Male sub D-9 connector of the special cable with the temperature controller, which is custom made at KVI. One end of this cable will have female sub D-9 connector and the other end will have a male 4 pin LEMO connector. The pin congurations of the cable is given in Tab. ??. Other important thing to know is the mounting of the laser diode into the home

Red LED (See color code in the table) photo diode (Green) ground (See color code in the table) laser diode

Blue (AD590 -Ve)

1 9

2 10

3 11

4 12

5 13

6 14

7 15

Red (TEC +Ve) Black (TEC -Ve)

Protection Diode

GreenLED White (AD590 +Ve)

(a) Female Sub D-15 attached to the laser diode base (TOP view)

1 6

2 7

3 8

4 9

1 6

2 7

3 8

4 9

Female sub D-9 connector for the current controller LDC500

Male sub D-9 connector for the diode laaser temperature controller (TC200)

1 9

2 10

3 11

4 12

5 13

6 14

7 15

Male Sub D-15 connecter for the female sub D-15 attached to the diode laser base (b) Special dual connector cable for temperature and current controller (TOP view)

Figure 5: Schematic of the electrical connections (a) Sub D-15 connector mounted to the diode laser mounting table (b) Connections of the custom made cable for providing connections to the temperature controller and to the diode laser driving current.

7 wire LEMO cable wire color pink green gray white blue

sub D-9 Male pin number 7 4 9 1 5

sub D-15 Male pin number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

sub D-9 Female pin number 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 -

7 wire LEMO cable wire color pink white gray yellow green brown blue -

Table 2: Pin connection of the custom made cable connecting the current and the temperature controller.

4 pin male LEMO connector pin number 1 2 3 4

wire color brown white yellow green

Female sub D-9 connector pin number 4 5 9 7

Table 3: Pin connection of the cable connecting the KVI temperature controller to the female sub D-9 connector of the custom made special cable.

7 S1 S2 S4
1. Diode laser holder 2. Lens holder 3. Grating 4. Grating holder 5. Piezo 6. Adjustment screw 7. Strain relief of diode laser 8. Diode laser out put S1. M3X12 hex screw S2. M2X8 hex screw S3. M3X16 hex screw S4. M2X15 circular screw

S3

Figure 6: Drawing of the diode laser base specially made for ECDL Litrow conguration made mounting systems for ECDL conguration. Solitary diode in a TO-3 package are mounted in a diode laser holder. The holder has to be of right diameter according to the 5.6 mm or 9 mm package type of the diode, so that the laser diode ts into it. A press ring on the back of the diode which xes the position inside the holder. Before pressing the ring we have to check the orientation of the spatial mode of the laser beam relative to the grating plane. The smaller spatial extension has to be along the grooves of the grating and the wider spatial extension of the beam has to the perpendicular of the grooves to get maximum diffraction efciency. The diffraction efciency depends on total number of illuminated grooves. Once we place the diode at a right angle we x it by pressing the ring. In front of the diode we use an aspheric lens for collimating the diverging beam. The screws of the lens mount, which xes the lens holder to the diode laser base, allows to change the distance from the DL to the lens within few mm. In this way we make the laser beam as good collimated as possible. A grating is mounted on the grating mount and is screwed up with the diode laser base. First we x the grating angle and then x the grating mount with the diode laser base by the screw. The part of the diode laser base which holds the grating has an ne adjustment screw, that allows the ne adjustment of the grating in the vertical plane. The screw connected with the piezo mount also has a ne adjustment for ne tuning of the grating angle in the horizontal plane. That changes the grating angle relative to the propagation direction of the laser.The hardware for the ECDL has been shown below in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8. Different parts and screws are also indicated there in the gure.

10

Sub D - 15 Female

2-pin LEMO

S1 P1 S2 S3 S3 S2

S1

S1

S4

S4 P2

P1 S1

S4 S1

S1

Diode laser base specially designed for ECD littrow configuration

1. Female Sub D -15: electrical connection for controlling diode laser 2. 2-pin female LEMO ENG .OB: high voltage for piezo connected with grating 3. White box: base for setting the diode laser in Littrow configuration 4. Dotted box: TEC cooler sitting under the neath of the DL base 5. S1: stainles steel screw M3X16, hex head 6. S2: stainles steel screw M3X12, hex head 7. S3: stainles steel screw M2X8, hex head 8. S4: stainles steel screw M2X15, circular head 9. P1: set screws for keeping diode laser holder fixed at a position 10. P2: set screw for veretical alignment of the grating

Figure 7: Schematic of the diode laser mounting table, which contains diode laser base and other necessary electrical connections for running the laser.

11

Wide band frequency tuning of a laser diode in ECDL conguration

To know about the frequency tuning of a diode laser, rst we have to understand little more about the lasing mechanism. The emission of light for a particular diode laser is limited within a frequency range. The amplitude of such an emission spectrum has a maximum at a particular frequency and that falls on either side of that frequency. That is called gain prole. There are several resonator modes with different center frequencies and with a certain spectral width are oscillating through the gain medium. Each of these resonator modes experience different gain thus the gain prole has a spectral width. That has been described else where in more detail [?]. In case of a ECDL we build up an external cavity using a grating and feed back a fraction of output light into the laser cavity. The detail of the ECDL have been described in section-1 of this chapter. So, in this case we feed back a particular resonator mode coming out of the diode into the laser diode cavity and force the diode to lase at that mode. In this way we make the laser diode operational in a single mode and in a narrow spectral range, of the order of 1 MHz. In this conguration changing the length of the external cavity matches with a different mode, i.e., a different frequency, in the diode cavity. On the other hand changing of the temperature and injection current also changes the lasing frequency. That has also been described in section-1. Taking example of our 1130.6 nm laser diode (LD 1120 0300 1), it tunes frequency ( f ) with the injection current (i) as, df = 172(5) MHz/mA. di The temperature (T ) tuning of the frequency is df = 20(10) MHz/mK. dT (8) (7)

Since we use this laser diode in an ECDL set up, that also allows us to frequency tune of that laser by tuning the grating angle. The grating angle changes with the tuning of piezo voltage, which is connected with the grating. This provides frequency tuning rate of df = 70(20) MHz/V . dV (9)

The tuning rate is very much dependent on the lasing mode, thats why the error bar on the tuning rate is rather large. From these tuning rates we see that the laser frequency is very sensitive to the current as well as temperature. That means for stabilizing a diode laser within the natural line width of a transition (on the order of 20 MHz), it requires a very stable current supply and a stable temperature controlling unit. Changing any of these three parameters, current, temperature 12

Figure 8: Tuning of the DL frequency by changing injection current to the laser diode. Each valley in the plot is corresponds to one mode-hop-free tuning range. or piezo voltage, scans the frequency of the laser. Wider tuning range of these parameters causes jump of the laser from one mode to another mode, that is called as mode-hop. Mode-hop-free tuning range are very different among different lasers and also this range is different in different laser modes. The theory behind this phenomena are rather complex and we are not interested to know that in detail. For wider scanning one has to change more than one parameters at the same time. Thus, when laser is appearing to jump from one to another mode due to changing of one parameter the other parameter changes in a way to keep the mode xed. So, this process requires a synchronized tuning of these parameters. There is not any particular theory behind the way of changing them. That varies diode to diode, even if they are categorically identical. For a particular DL it is rather trial and error method in the beginning and once it is working we have xed this process. For our 1130.6 nm diode laser the average mode-hop-free tuning range is on the order of 800 1000 MHz. Since changing of temperature requires some time for the temperature controller to stabilize the case temperature of the laser diode, we have chosen changing of current and grating angle in a synchronized way for the above mentioned technique for widening the mode-hop-free scan range. In Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 we see the typical characteristics of the 1130.6 nm DL. The wavelength of the diode jumps between two different range of wavelengths, 1129.800.15 nm and 1130.500.15 nm, in steps of 6001000 MHz while changing either the piezo voltage or the current. The schematic of the electrical connection for the synchronized tuning of the current and piezo voltage has been shown in the Fig. 10. We generally use a triangular wave front, ramp signal, out of a frequency synthesizer and pass it through two individual ampliers. The ampliers are made out of operational ampliers (OPAMP) and gain of the ampliers are dened by ratio between feedback resis13

Figure 9: Tuning of the DL frequency by tuning piezo voltage, which connected with the grating. Each valley corresponds to one mode-hop-free tuning range.

Ground Injection current for laser diode -15 4 Modulation in OPAMP R2 Frequency synthesizer R4 + + 2 7 +15 R1 R3 +15 7 OPAMP 3 _ 4 -15 Piezo connected to grating 6 High voltage amplifier 6 Diode laser current controller

R0

R0

Ground

Figure 10: Block diagram of the electrical connections for the synchronized tuning of diode current and piezo voltage.

14

Figure 11: Distribution of output power along the spatial axes of a diode laser output. tors (R2 and R4 ) to the bias resistors (R1 or R3 ). gain o f the OPAMP = f eedback resistance . bias resistance (10)

We use output of one OPAMP directly to the modulation IN port of the current supply of the laser diode for external modulation of the injection current. Gain of these two ampliers has been chosen such that change of one volt in the ramping changes frequency of the DL by the same amount in both ways by changing of current and piezo voltage. The ne tuning on the gains can be done by changing bias resistance on the potentiometer. The output from other OPAMP we amplify using a high voltage amplier (HV amplier) and then apply that to the piezo for tuning the grating angle. In this way one can choose different mode of the laser by changing offset voltage of the ramp signal. That shifts the tuning range for both current and piezo at the same time. The HV amplier also has a separate offset, which changes the scan range of the piezo voltage only. For ne adjustment of the mode-hop-free tuning, we use the offset of the HV amplier. In this way we have achieved to scan the 1130.6 nm DL by 1 GHz in a mode-hop-free tuning.

15

Bibliography [1] W. Demtroder, Laser Spectroscopy, Springer, Third Edition, chapter 5 (2002). [2] http://www.qphotonics.com/. [3] K. MacAdam, A. Steinbach, and C. E. Wieman, Am. J. Phys. 60, 1098 (1987). [4] L. Ricci, M. Weidem ller, T. Esslinger, A. Hemmerich, C. Zimmermann, V. u Vuletic, W. Konig, and T. W. H nsch, Opt. Comm. 117, 541 (1995). a [5] C. E. Wieman, and L. Hollberg, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 62, 1 (1991). 6 Diodelaser6L. Hollberg, R. Fox, S. Waltman, and H. Robinson, NIST Technical Note 1504, May (1998).

16