Polarization purity for active stabilization of diode laser injection lock.

Abstract

Injection locking of diode lasers is commonly used to amplify low power laser light but is extremely sensitive to perturbations in the laser current and temperature. To counter such perturbations, active stabilization is often applied to the current of the injection locked diode. We observe that the diode laser's polarization extinction ratio (PER) greatly increases when injection locked, and therefore the PER provides a measure of injection lock quality. We report robust active stabilization of a diode laser injection lock based on the PER, demonstrating the technique at 399nm wavelength where injection locking is typically less stable than at longer wavelengths. The PER provides a feedback error signal that is compatible with standard proportional integral differential servo controllers, requires no additional optical components beyond the optical isolator typically used in injection locking, and enables a large feedback bandwidth.