High-power dual-comb thin-disk oscillator

Abstract

Dual-comb spectroscopy is a rapidly advancing spectrometric technique where the temporal interferograms generated with two asynchronous trains of pulses are recorded, and Fourier transformed to reveal the spectrum of an absorber in the beam path [1]. To date, best performance is achieved with systems involving complex active stabilization of two femtosecond erbium fiber lasers [1]. One way to simplify the technique is to generate a dual-comb output from a single laser cavity. However, there have been only a few demonstrations of such a scheme so far [2,3]. Here we present a dual-comb system based on a single thin-disk oscillator. The novel architecture effectively rejects common noise, with mutual coherence time exceeding one second without any active stabilization. Moreover, the system shows nearly an order of magnitude higher average and peak output powers compared to previous dual-comb demonstrations. Efficient nonlinear frequency conversion to the UV or mid-IR regions-of high interest to molecular spectroscopy-will thus be greatly facilitated.