Fast scanning cavity offset lock for laser frequency drift stabilization.

We have implemented a compact setup for long-term laser frequency stabilization. Light from a stable reference laser and several slave lasers is coupled into a confocal Fabry-Perot resonator. By stabilizing the position of the transmission peaks of the slave lasers relative to successive peaks of the master laser as the length of the cavity is scanned over one free spectral range, the long-term stability of the master laser is transferred to the slave lasers. By using fast analog peak detection and low-latency microcontroller-based digital feedback, with a scanning frequency of 3 kHz, we obtain a feedback bandwidth of 380 Hz and a relative stability of better than 10 kHz at timescales longer than 1 s, a significant improvement on previous scanning-cavity stabilization systems. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3455830]