A novel control system for automatically locking a diode laser frequency to a selected gas absorption line

摘要

A novel control system has been developed for avoiding manual operation during traditional frequency locking. The control system uses a computer with a commercial data acquisition card. This accomplishes the whole operation of frequency locking, including generating ramp, searching locking point, engaging a proportional-integral-differential (PID) regulator at the proper time and outputting PID compensation signal. Moreover, a new method has also been employed to make the novel control system accurately identify the locking points of all absorption lines within the scanning range, so that the laser frequency can be automatically firmly brought onto any selected absorption line centre without any adjusting time. The operation of the system, the ability to identify absorption lines and the performance of the frequency locking were discussed in detail. Successful tests were made with two different lasers: external cavity diode lasers and distributed feedback diode lasers.