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Brillouin laser-driven terahertz oscillator up to 3 THz with femtosecond-level timing jitter

Nature Photonics (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The terahertz (THz) frequency range, spanning from 0.1 to 10.0 THz, is a field ripe for innovation with vast, developing potential in areas like wireless communication and molecular spectroscopy. Our work introduces a dual-wavelength laser design that utilizes stimulated Brillouin scattering in an optical fibre cavity to effectively generate two highly coherent optical Stokes waves with inherently mitigated differential phase noise. To guarantee robust operation, the Stokes waves are optically injected into their respective pump lasers, which also serves to greatly improve the resulting coherence. The frequency difference between the two wavelengths is converted into THz waves through a uni-travelling-carrier photodiode. This innovative design facilitates the generation of THz waves with phase noise levels of less than –100 dBc Hz–1, translating to timing noise below 10 as Hz–1/2 at 10 kHz Fourier frequency, over a carrier frequency range from 300 GHz to 3 THz. This development in phase noise reduction establishes a new benchmark in the spectral purity of tunable THz sources. Such advances are pivotal for applications to move beyond oscillator constraints.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the DWBL and the resulting spectra.
Fig. 2: Schematic for THz frequency metrology and results.
Fig. 3: Comparison of THz sources’ timing noise.

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Data availability

Raw data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to T. Nagatsuma of Osaka University for providing us with the 600 GHz UTC-PD and detector. The second DWBL was built using funding provided through the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan, grant no. JPJ012368C-00901 (T.H. and T.T.).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Boulder Research Labs, IMRA, America Inc., Longmont, CO, USA

    Brendan M. Heffernan, James Greenberg & Antoine Rolland

  2. Japan Branch Office, IMRA, America Inc., Aichi, Japan

    Takashi Hori & Tatsuya Tanigawa

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  1. Brendan M. Heffernan
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  4. Tatsuya Tanigawa
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Contributions

B.M.H., T.H., T.T. and A.R. designed, built and operated the DWBLs and the characterization setups. B.M.H., J.G. and A.R. acquired, analysed and interpreted the data. B.M.H. and A.R. drafted the initial manuscript, with all co-authors contributing to the final version. A.R. initiated, conceived and supervised the project.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Brendan M. Heffernan or Antoine Rolland.

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Competing interests

B.M.H., A.R. and J.G. are inventors on a patent application filed in the USA (US20230333012A1) that may be related to the subject matter disclosed in this Article. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Photonics thanks Lute Maleki, Thomas Schneider and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Sections 1–9, Figs. 1–8 and discussion.

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Data used to generate Fig. 1.

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Data used to generate Fig. 2.

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Heffernan, B.M., Greenberg, J., Hori, T. et al. Brillouin laser-driven terahertz oscillator up to 3 THz with femtosecond-level timing jitter. Nat. Photon. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01513-z

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