• J.W.  Staples, R.B. Wilcox
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

Funding: This work supported by the US Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098

Stabilization of the transit time through a glass fiber using an optical heterodyne technique promises to provide jitter reduction down to the few femtosecond level using inexpensive commodity hardware. An acousto-optical frequency shifter provides the optical frequency offset that is used to downconvert phase shifts at optical frequency to equivalent phase shifts at radio frequency which are used to close a phase-lock loop driving a piezoelectric phase shifter. Using the stabilized fiber transmission medium, two spectral lines of a mode locked laser lock two low-power CW lasers which are transmitted to a receiver which phase locks the same spectral lines of a second mode-locked laser to the first. The optical transmission system operates at low power and is linear, providing excellent signal-to-noise ratio and allows many signals to be transmitted without mutual interference. Experimental results will be presented.