High stability laser locking to an optical cavity using tilt locking

This paper describes, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of high performance tilt locking, a method of stabilizing laser frequency to an optical reference cavity using a spatial-modereadout technique. The experiment utilized a traveling wave cavity with a finesse of approximately 10,000, housed in a thermally controlled vacuum chamber. The tilt locking method in a double pass configuration has promising performance in the 100 mu Hz-1 Hz band, including surpassing the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Follow-On laser ranging interferometer requirement. Tilt locking offers a number of benefits such as high sensitivity, low cost, and simple implementation and therefore should be considered for future applications requiring high performance laser locking, such as future laser-based satellite geodesy missions and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

This paper presents the first demonstration of high performance tilt locking, a method of stabilizing laser frequency to an optical reference cavity using a spatial-mode readout technique. The experiment achieved promising performance in the 100 mu Hz-1 Hz band, surpassing the requirements of the GRACE Follow-On laser ranging interferometer. Tilt locking offers benefits such as high sensitivity, low cost, and simple implementation for future applications requiring high performance laser locking.