Design of digital Pound-Drever-Hall frequency stabilizing
system for two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser
XING Junhong, JIAO Mingxing*, ZHENG Yi, ZHENG Lingling
Department of Precision Instruments, School of Mechanical and Instrumental Engineering, Xi’an
University of Technology, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710048, People’s Republic of China
*jiaomx@xaut.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
Two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser with large frequency difference can be used as an ideal light source for
synthetic-wave absolute-distance interferometric system. The operation principle of the two-cavity dual-frequency
Nd:YAG laser with large frequency difference has been introduced, and the frequency locking principle of the
Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) method has been analyzed. A FPGA-based digital PDH frequency stabilizing system for the
two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser has been designed, in which the same frequency reference of a high finesse
Fabry-Perot cavity is used and two separate heterodyne interference sub-systems are employed so that two electrical
error signals can be obtained. Having been processed through FPGA, the output signals are applied to drive the PZT
frequency actuators attached on the two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser, as a result both operating frequencies of
the two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser can be simultaneously frequency-locked to two resonant frequencies of the
Fabry-Perot cavity. A frequency stability of better than 10
-10
will be obtained by use of the digital PDH frequency locking
system, which can meet the needs of synthetic-wave absolute-distance interferometry.
Keywords: two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser, Pound-Drever-Hall method, Fabry-Perot cavity, FPGA,
absolute-distance interferometry
1. INTRODUCTION
Tunable dual-frequency laser with large frequency difference plays an important role in synthetic-wave
absolute-distance interferometry
[1-2]
, terahertz-wave generation
[3]
and other fields of science. Two-cavity
dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser with large frequency difference can be used as an ideal light source for
synthetic-wave absolute-distance interferometric system. In order to improve the accuracy of synthetic-wave
absolute-distance measurement, it is required that the dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser frequencies be stabilized so as
to obtain a stable synthetic wavelength, which is used as a length reference in the absolute-distance interferometric
system. We see that the research of frequency stabilizing system for two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser is of
great scientific significance.
In the past few decades several techniques have been developed to readout laser frequency relative to a
cavity resonance
[4–6]
. For some of these DC techniques low frequency technical noise from either the laser or the
photo-detector couples into the error signal. A readout technique that avoids laser and photo-detector technical
noise is the Pound–Drever–Hall (PDH) technique
[7- 8]
.
In this paper, we will first present the operation principle of the two-cavity dual-frequency Nd:YAG laser
Instrumentation, edited by Jiubin Tan, Xianfang Wen, Proc. of SPIE
Vol. 8759, 875941 · © 2013 SPIE · CCC code: /13/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.2015216
Proc. of SPIE Vol. 8759 875941-1