Innovative Photonic Solutions — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 03b

Description

Single-mode frequency stabilized diode lasers are important for practical applications of gas spectroscopy. One such particularly critical application is a sensitive, affordable, accurate instrument to detect special nuclear materials such as enriched uranium-235. Extreme stability one part in 400 billion is needed, and even a very slight drift of optical frequency will causes the instrument to lose lock. New thermally insulating enclosures, specially prepared materials, and temperature compensation will take stability to within a factor of 100 to 1000 of the goal. But to get the remaining stability, an optical stabilization feedback loop will be required, locking the laser frequency to a reference gas or optical cavity. The new optically stabilized laser will be small and affordable. In Phase I, designs will be introduced that mitigate strain in machined parts, thermal flows will be modeled and their effect on cavity and wavelength drift minimized, optimized optical cavity designs will be introduced that tend to null wavelength drift, a thermal enclosure will undergo design trade-off to achieve size, tunability and stability needs, and efficient, small-size, affordable optical feedback stabilization schemes such as etalons, gas-filled etalons, and microelectronic analogs of hollow cathode lamps will be investigated for miniaturization in the new stabilized diode laser. There is a sizable market for stabilized optical sources for applications other than detecting enriched uranium, in remote sensing and imaging, measurements requiring the precision of interferometry, seeding powerful single frequency lasers. While many of these applications are highly technical, they have direct applicability to security, energy, the environment, and health concerns that affect everyone.