A compact and efficient hyper coherent light source of visible violet laser diode based on Pound-Drever-Hall technique

In the present work, we have developed an efficient and well stablized hyper coherent diode laser light source as compact as even portable using commercially available visible 400 nm band laser diodes. The attained coherence of the present system can always be controlled at the best condition indifferent to changes in its settled environmental conditions by applying Pound-Drever-Hall technique in which the frequency of a 160mW type 405nm GaN violet laser diode is locked to a reference Fabry-Perot cavity by negative electrical feedback for the injection current of the laser diode based on FM sideband technique. In addition to this frequency stabilization system, we have also realized a stability evaluation system that can measure the Allan variance of the frequency fluctuations of our frequency stabilized laser source in real-time basis by using simple devices of a portable computer and a digital signal processing unit. As a result, we have accomplished a compact and efficient hyper coherent laser system which can always perform its optimum conditions even if the environmental conditions around the laser are to be dynamically changed when used in a field basis. The attained values of power spectral density (PSD) of FM noise calculated from the error signals of our system under controlled condition were better by about 1~2 orders than typical values of free-running conditions in the fourier frequency domain from 100Hz to 300kHz. The best achieved value of PSD was about 2.56×107 [Hz2/Hz] in the fourier frequency domain from 100Hz to 1kHz, while as for the Allan variance as another measure of frequency stability, the achieved value of the minimum square root of Allan variance was 3.46×10-11 in a 400nm type violet laser diode at integration time of 10 ms, which has been well comparable to the hyper coherent condition for the laser diode light sources.