Promising new calibration tools, called laser frequency combs, could allow astronomers to take a major step in discovering and characterizing earthlike planets around other stars. These devices generate evenly spaced lines of light, much like the teeth on a comb for styling hair or the tick marks on a ruler -- hence their nickname of "optical rulers." The tick marks serve as stable reference points when making precision measurements such as those of the small shifts in starlight caused by planets pulling gravitationally on their parent stars.
Yet today's commercially available combs have a significant drawback. Because their tick marks are so finely spaced, the light output of these combs must be filtered to produce useful reference lines. This extra step adds complexity to the system and requires costly additional equipment.
To resolve these kinds of issues, Caltech researchers looked to a kind of comb not previously deployed for astronomy. The novel comb produces easily resolvable lines, without any need for filtering. Furthermore, the Caltech comb is built from off-the-shelf components developed by the telecommunications industry.
"We have demonstrated an alternative approach that is simple, reliable, and relatively inexpensive," says paper coauthor Kerry Vahala, the Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Applied Physics as well as the executive officer for Applied Physics and Materials Science in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science. The kind of frequency comb used by the researchers previously has been studied in the Vahala group in a different application, the generation of high-stability microwaves.
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