A Portable Optical Frequency Comb with Low Repetition-Rate Drift Based on "Optical Cubes"
Abstract
We demonstrate a compact, fully stabilized, all-polarization-maintaining (all-PM) Er:fiber optical frequency comb (OFC) implemented on a silica optical-cube platform. The optical comb module, including the oscillator, amplifier, spectral-broadening stage, 780-nm frequency-doubling branch, and f-to-2f interferometer, occupies a volume of 0.88 L. Without active temperature control, the free-running repetition frequency exhibits a peak-to-peak excursion of 75 Hz over 10 h, corresponding to 0.375 ppm. Under the same laboratory conditions, this excursion is 6.2 times smaller than that of a mechanically mounted non-PM reference comb. The amplified pulses are compressed to 94 fs and spectrally broadened in a PM highly nonlinear fiber. A coherent-population-trapping-based chip-scale atomic clock is employed for the first time as the radio-frequency reference for comb locking, thereby reducing the footprint of the microwave-reference subsystem. The resulting in-loop, optical-frequency-normalized tracking instability reaches 6.03E-17 at 1 s and 2.57E-18 at 10,000 s. These results demonstrate a compact comb architecture with reduced sensitivity to environmental perturbations, providing a practical route toward portable optical atomic clocks.
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BibTeX
@misc{chen2026portable,
title = {{A Portable Optical Frequency Comb with Low Repetition-Rate Drift Based on "Optical Cubes"}},
author = {Zhendong Chen and Hanbo Xu and Ruoao Yang and Tianyu Liu and Hongshuo Wu and Duo Pan and Zhigang Zhang and Jianjun Wu and Jingbiao Chen},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.14490},
eprint = {2610.14490},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14490},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Portable Optical Frequency Comb with Low Repetition-Rate Drift Based on "Optical Cubes"
AU - Zhendong Chen
AU - Hanbo Xu
AU - Ruoao Yang
AU - Tianyu Liu
AU - Hongshuo Wu
AU - Duo Pan
AU - Zhigang Zhang
AU - Jianjun Wu
AU - Jingbiao Chen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/10
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.14490
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14490
AB - We demonstrate a compact, fully stabilized, all-polarization-maintaining (all-PM) Er:fiber optical frequency comb (OFC) implemented on a silica optical-cube platform. The optical comb module, including the oscillator, amplifier, spectral-broadening stage, 780-nm frequency-doubling branch, and f-to-2f interferometer, occupies a volume of 0.88 L. Without active temperature control, the free-running repetition frequency exhibits a peak-to-peak excursion of 75 Hz over 10 h, corresponding to 0.375 ppm. Under the same laboratory conditions, this excursion is 6.2 times smaller than that of a mechanically mounted non-PM reference comb. The amplified pulses are compressed to 94 fs and spectrally broadened in a PM highly nonlinear fiber. A coherent-population-trapping-based chip-scale atomic clock is employed for the first time as the radio-frequency reference for comb locking, thereby reducing the footprint of the microwave-reference subsystem. The resulting in-loop, optical-frequency-normalized tracking instability reaches 6.03E-17 at 1 s and 2.57E-18 at 10,000 s. These results demonstrate a compact comb architecture with reduced sensitivity to environmental perturbations, providing a practical route toward portable optical atomic clocks.
ER -