Phase locking of a frequency agile laser

Abstract

The authors report on the development and phase locking of a frequency agile laser. The use of a simple unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer together with a wideband phase-locked loop permits to control very fast frequency chirps (up to 3GHz in 5μs) with an excellent precision (frequency error less than 100kHz). The servoloop could be applied to many tunable lasers.