Wide and fast-frequency tuning for a stabilized diode laser

External-cavity diode laser (ECDL) has important applications in many fundamental and applied researches. Here we report a method to fast and widely tune the frequency of a stabilized ECDL. The beat frequency between the ECDL and a frequency-locked reference laser is identified by the voltage-controlled oscillator contained in a phase detector, whose output voltage is subtracted from the flexibly controlled PC signal to generate an error signal for stabilizing the ECDL. The output frequency of the stabilized ECDL can be shifted at a short characteristic time of similar to 150 mu s within a range of similar to 620 MHz. The wide and fast-frequency tuning achieved by our method is compared with other previous works. We demonstrated the performance of our method by the efficient sub-Doppler cooling of Cs atoms with the temperature as low as 6 mu K.

Automated summary

In this paper, a method for fast and wide-frequency tuning of a stabilized ECDL is reported and compared with previous works. The output frequency of the stabilized ECDL can be shifted within a range of approximately 620 MHz in a short time.