{"id":98268,"date":"2019-11-08T03:27:39","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T11:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/frequency-combs-shape-the-future-of-light"},"modified":"2019-11-08T03:27:39","modified_gmt":"2019-11-08T11:27:39","slug":"frequency-combs-shape-the-future-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/frequency-combs-shape-the-future-of-light","title":{"rendered":"Frequency combs shape the future of light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/frequency-combs-shape-the-future-of-light2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first time an optical-frequency comb was used to measure the atomic hydrogen 1S-2S optical transition frequency, which was achieved at the Max-Planck-Institut f\u00fcr Quantenoptik (MPQ) in Garching, Germany. Menlo Systems, which was founded soon afterwards as a spin-off from MPQ, has been commercializing and pioneering the technology ever since.<\/p>\n<p>Today, optical frequency combs (OFCs) are routinely employed in applications as diverse as time and frequency metrology, spectroscopy, telecommunications, and fundamental physics. The German company\u2019s fibre-based systems, and its proprietary \u201cfigure 9\u201d laser mode-locking technology, have set the precedent for the most stable, reliable, robust, and compact optical frequency combs available on the market today.<\/p>\n<p>An optical frequency comb exploits laser light that comprises up to 10<sup>6<\/sup> equidistant, phase-stable frequencies to measure other unknown frequencies with exquisite precision, and with absolute traceability when compared against a radiofrequency standard. The most common and versatile approach to create an OFC is to stabilize an ultrafast mode-locked laser, in which pulses of light bounce back and forth in an optical cavity. The frequency spectrum of the resulting pulse train is a series of very sharp peaks that are evenly spaced in frequency, like the teeth of a comb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first time an optical-frequency comb was used to measure the atomic hydrogen 1S-2S optical transition frequency, which was achieved at the Max-Planck-Institut f\u00fcr Quantenoptik (MPQ) in Garching, Germany. Menlo Systems, which was founded soon afterwards as a spin-off from MPQ, has been commercializing and pioneering the technology [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}