Ultra-stable cryogenic sapphire cavity laser with an instability reaching 2 × 10⁻¹⁶ based on a low vibration level cryostat

Abstract

Cryogenic ultra-stable lasers have extremely low thermal noise limits and frequency drifts, but they are more seriously affected by vibration noise from cryostats. Main material candidates for cryogenic ultra-stable cavities include silicon and sapphire. Although sapphire has many excellent properties at low temperature, the development of sapphire-based cavities is less advanced than that of silicon-based. Using a homemade cryogenic sapphire cavity, we develop an ultra-stable laser source with a frequency instability of 2(1) × 10^-16. This is the best frequency instability level among similar systems using cryogenic sapphire cavities reported so far. Low vibration performance of the cryostat is demonstrated with a two-stage vibration isolation, and the vibration suppression is optimized by tuning the mixing ratio of the gas-liquid-helium. With this technique, the linear power spectral densities of vibrations at certain frequencies higher than tens of hertz are suppressed by two orders of magnitude in all directions.