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Igju Jeon, Changmin Ahn, Myeongchan Park

Mechanical engineering, KAIST

Ultra-stable micro-combs and their microwave photonic applications

The ultra-high-Q micro-resonator based Kerr frequency combs have potential for generating high-frequency, low-noise microwaves due to their high repetition rate and low jitter. For better noise performance, the Kerr frequency comb have to be stabilized to a specific optical reference. While ultra-stable optical cavity-based stabilization method is bulky, expensive and align-sensitive, fiber delay-line-based method can provide compact and inexpensive stabilization platform with comparable performance. In this research, micro-comb from ultra-high-Q (200 million) silica micro-resonator is stabilized with 1-km optical fiber delay-line, then 22-GHz microwave is generated with -110 dBc/Hz phase noise at 1 kHz Fourier frequency and with 10^(-13)-level frequency instability within 1-s. In the future, the micro-comb will be stabilized to optical lattice clock(10^(-16) frequency instability within 1 second) which is far from the laboratory(~10 km) through optical fiber network. We will use this lattice-clock-referenced micro-comb to generate ultra-stable, high-frequency microwave used in VLBI(Very Long Baseline Interferometry) system to improve its time and space resolution. Furthermore, we are now researching on fiber-ring based laser stabilization method, which is applied to continuous wave laser with frequency instability of 10^(-14)-level at 0.05-s. In the future, the method will be applied to micro-comb which can make compact-size ultra-stable comb source.

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