Empa Eidgenossische Materialprufungs-und Forschungsanstalt

Irsweep Ag

Akshay Nataraj

Andreas Hugi

Markus Mangold

Lukas Emmenegger

Michele Gianella

A dual-comb spectrometerwith two lasersserving as a local oscillator and an interrogator. The lasers output light beams with respective frequency combs C, Cof defined free spectral range, FSR. A detectorcan detect heterodyne mixing of the combined beams to detect an RF frequency comb C. Respective control signals are supplied to the lasers which have functional forms configured to cause the frequencies of the lasers' frequency combs C, Cto tune over a defined fraction of their FSR. This enables a reduction of the effective spectral sampling period by a factor equal to the ratio of the FSR to the spectral resolution of the spectrometer, which will typically be several orders of magnitude, so that the spectral sampling period can be reduced from the GHz to the MHz range, which in turn enables a gapless spectrum to be obtained in a short time.

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Zurich, Switzerland

Akshay Nataraj