Thomann, Pierre

2000, Lecomte, Steve, Fretel, Emmanuel, Mileti, Gaetano, Thomann, Pierre

An extended-cavity diode laser at 852 nm has been built especially for the purpose of cooling and probing cesium atoms. It is a compact, self-aligned, and continuously tunable laser source having a 100-kHz linewidth and 60-mW output power. The electronic control of the laser frequency by the piezodriven external reflector covers a 4.5-kHz bandwidth, allowing full compensation of acoustic frequency noise without any adverse effect on the laser intensity noise. We locked this laser to Doppler-free resonances on the cesium D-2 line by using the Zeeman modulation technique, resulting in the frequency and the intensity of the laser beam being unmodulated. We also tuned the locked laser frequency over a span of 120 MHz by using the de Zeeman effect to shift the F = 4-F' = 5 reference transition. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: 140.2020, 140.3570, 140.3600, 260.7490, 300.6460.