Demonstration of a highly stable 10 GHz optical frequency comb with low timing jitter from a SCOWA-based harmonically mode-locked nested cavity laser

An optical frequency comb with mode spacing of 10 GHz operating in the c-band is produced from a harmonically mode-locked laser using a slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier device with a fiber-coupled external cavity. An intracavity Fabry-Perot etalon serves as a high finesse optical filter for supermode suppression and as the reference for cavity length stabilization using a multi-combline Pound-Drever-Hall setup. The Allan deviation of a single optical combline near 193.4 THz is measured via a heterodyne beat with a cavity stabilized cw laser and reaches a minimum fractional frequency deviation of 3 x 10(-13) at tau = 30 ms. In addition, the phase noise of the photodetected pulsed output of the laser shows a timing jitter of <23 fs integrated from 1 Hz to the Nyquist frequency. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America