Study of Optical Phase Lock Loops and the Applications in Coherent Beam Combining and Coherence Cloning

Abstract

Optical Phase-Lock loops (OPLLs) have potential applications in phase coherent optics including frequency synthesis, clock distribution and recovery, jitter and noise reduction, etc. However, most implemented OPLLs are based on solid state lasers, fiber lasers, or specially designed semiconductor lasers, whose bulky size and high cost inhibit the applications of OPLLs. Semiconductor lasers have the advantages of low cost, small size, and high efficiency. In this thesis, I report on a study of OPLLs using commercial SCLs, and explore their novel applications in coherent beam combining and coherence cloning. In chapter 1-3, I will first introduce the theory of OPLLs and presents the experimental study of OPLLs made of different commercial SCLs. To improve the performance of OPLLs, electronic compensations using filter designs are also discussed and studied. In chapter 4-5, I will study the application of OPLLs in coherent beam combining. Using OPLLs, an array of slave lasers can be phase locked to the same master laser at the same frequency, their outputs can then be coherently combined. The phase variations of the element beams due to the optical path-length variations in fibers can be further corrected for by using multi-level OPLLs. This approach eliminates the use of the optical phase/frequency shifters conventionally required in a coherent beam combining system. In the proof of principle experiment, we have combined two lasers with a combining efficiency of 94% using the filled-aperture combining configuration. Furthermore, I will discuss the scalability of a cascaded filled-aperture combining system for the combination of a large number of lasers. OPLLs can also be used to reduce the phase noise of SCLs by locking them to a low noise master laser. In chapter 6, I will describe the theory of coherence cloning using OPLLs and present the experimental measurements of the linewidths and frequency noises of a low noise fiber laser, a free-running and locked slave lasers. In chapter 7, the thesis concludes by proposing a novel OPLL configuration of large loop bandwidth and identifying future works that need to be done to advance the development of this technology.