title: Developing a narrow-line laser spectrometer based on a tunable continuous-wave dye laser.
abstract: We present the development of a dye-laser-based spectrometer operating at 550-600 nm. The spectrometer will be used to detect an ultra-narrow clock transition ((1)S0-(3)P0) in an Ytterbium optical lattice clock and perform high-resolution spectroscopy of iodine molecules trapped in the sub-nanometer channels of zeolite crystal (AlPO4-11). Two-stage Pound-Drever-Hall frequency stabilization is implemented on the tunable continuous-wave dye laser to obtain a reliable operation and provide stable laser radiations with two different spectral linewidths. In the first-stage frequency locking, a compact home-built intracavity electro-optic modulator is adopted for suppressing fast frequency noise. With an acquisition time of 0.1 s the 670-kHz linewidth of the free-running dye laser is reduced to 2 kHz when locked to a pre-stabilization optical cavity with a finesse of 1170. When the pre-stabilized laser is locked to a high-finesse optical cavity, a linewidth of 1.4 Hz (2 s) is observed and the frequency stability is 3.7 × 10(-15) (3 s). We also measure and analyze the individual noise contributions such as those from residual amplitude modulation and electronic noise. The ongoing upgrades include improving long-term frequency stability at time scales from 10 to 100 s and implementing continuous frequency scan across 10 GHz with radio-frequency precision.
authors.affiliation: Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.
authors.forename: Chun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.
authors.forename: Shasha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.affiliation: College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bi
authors.affiliation: Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.
authors.forename: Liufeng
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.
authors.forename: Lisheng
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen