Optical frequency comb
Peine de frecuencias óptico
- Date
- 1999-2000 · confidence high
- Place
- Garching, Bavaria, Germany
- Credited to
- Theodor Hänsch and John Hall (with Udem and Holzwarth)
- Field
- Communication
What it is
An ultrashort-pulse laser whose spectrum is a ruler of thousands of equally spaced lines, linking microwave and optical frequencies. It lets light frequencies be measured to 15 digits.
Hänsch and Hall shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics; the comb was demonstrated in practice in 1999-2000 with titanium-sapphire lasers and photonic fibres.
What it led to
- optical atomic clocks
- high-precision spectroscopy
- calibration of exoplanet spectrographs