Stabilized CO2/OsO4laser with a frequency reproducibility of 10−12

Abstract

A CO2/OsO4 laser stabilized by saturated absorption was constructed. Its long-term instability was 5×10−13 in several hours and the error in the frequency reproducibility was 10−12 from shot to shot. This reproducibility was achieved by developing a method for the control of the frequency shift caused by amplitude modulation and gas lens effects. The method was based on an analysis of the profile of the derivative of a reference line. The fundamental collisional shift of the working transition in OsO4 was found experimentally: at pressures in the range ~ 1 mTorr the shift did not exceed ±10−12 when the pressure was altered by a factor of 2. An important factor which limited the frequency reproducibility of a laser with an external nonlinearly absorbing cell could be the misalignment of the opposite beams in the cell.