A phase-stable dual-comb interferometer

Abstract

Laser frequency combs emit a spectrum with hundreds of thousands of evenly spaced phase-coherent narrow lines. A comb-enabled instrument, the dual-comb interferometer, exploits interference between two frequency combs and attracts considerable interest in precision spectroscopy and sensing, distance metrology, tomography, telecommunications, etc. Mutual coherence between the two combs over the measurement time is a pre-requisite to interferometry, although it is instrumentally challenging. At best, the mutual coherence reaches about 1 s. Computer-based phase-correction techniques, which often lead to artifacts and worsened precision, must be implemented for longer averaging times. Here with feed-forward relative stabilization of the carrier-envelope offset frequencies, we experimentally realize a mutual coherence over times approaching 2000 s, more than three orders of magnitude longer than that of state-of-the-art dual-comb systems. An illustration is given with near-infrared Fourier transform molecular spectroscopy with two combs of slightly different repetition frequencies. Our technique without phase correction can be implemented with any frequency comb generator including microresonators or semiconductor lasers.