HRR Comb

HRR Comb

Vescent Awarded Contract to Develop a Multi-Gigahertz Optical Frequency Comb

 
Vescent has been awarded a $1.25M Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the Air Force (AFRL, WPAFB) to develop a fully stabilized, multi-gigahertz-repetition rate optical frequency comb (OFC).  The output of the 18-month award will meet both military and non-military requirements for next-generation, field-deployable coherent standoff detection and advanced hyperspectral imaging. In addition, the device to be developed is directly applicable to a wide range of adjacent fields including high-speed optical time transfer, GPS and 5G communication interruption immunity, and photonic analog-to-digital conversion with gigahertz fidelity. 
 
Menhir Photonics will provide the gigahertz repetition rate mode-locked laser – the teeth to the comb.  The robust nature of the Menhir oscillator makes an excellent launch pad for further stabilization of the carrier offset frequency (ƒCEO) and locking to an optical reference (ƒopt).
 
Octave Photonics, acting as a subcontractor, will supply their innovative COSMO Comb Offset Stabilization Module for the detection of ƒCEO which will in turn be stabilized using Vescent control electronics.
 
The application for which the funding was awarded, standoff detection of hazardous gases, is currently served by either the interferometric detection of infrared supercontinuum sources using Fourier Transform Spectroscopy (FTS) or by tunable infrared laser spectroscopy using quantum cascade lasers (QCLs).  For high-spectral resolution, FTS is constrained to low data acquisition rates on the order of seconds and is susceptible to environmental noise due to its mechanical nature. In addition, supercontinuum technology in the infrared is not yet commercially mature.  Likewise, QCL-based tunable laser spectroscopy is limited to a narrow spectral bandwidth and struggles to simultaneously resolve multiple gas species spanning the molecular fingerprint spectral region (2 – 20 mm). Our OFC approach, in contrast, will offer both broadband spectral coverage and fast data acquisition rates.  The multi-GHz OFC enables fast and efficient, long-range standoff detection. This has already led to the rapid commercial adoption of OFCs in remote-sensing, particularly in field-deployed standoff detection of greenhouse gas emissions relevant to the oil and gas industry. But the spectral acquisition speed of these systems scales with the square of the repetition rate of the OFC, putting the currently commercially available OFCs with low repetition rates (80-500 MHz) at a throughput disadvantage. 
 
The team has, independent of the SBIR funding, demonstrated a simplified method of stabilizing the offset frequency of a high-repetition rate mode-locked laser.  This program will extend the efficacy of this work and raise the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of the available instruments.
 
 
 
Vescent is a market leader in the design and manufacture of deployable optical frequency combs.