Highly stabilized optical frequency comb interferometer with a long fiber-based reference path towards arbitrary distance measurement.

Abstract

An optical frequency comb interferometer with a 342-m-long fiber-based optical reference path was developed. The long fiber-based reference path was stabilized to 10(-12)-order stability by using a fiber noise cancellation technique, and small temperature changes on the millikelvin order were detected by measuring an interferometric phase signal. Pulse number differences of 30 and 61 between the measurement and reference paths were determined precisely, with slight tuning of the 53.4 MHz repetition frequency. Moreover, with pulse number difference of 61, a 6.4-m-wide scanning for the relative pulse position is possible only by 1 MHz repetition frequency tuning, which makes pulses overlapped for arbitrary distance. Such wide-range high-precision delay length scanning can be used to measure arbitrary distances by using a highly stabilized long fiber-based reference path.