High stability laser locking to an optical cavity using tilt locking

This paper describes, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of high performance tilt locking, a method of stabilizing laser frequency to an optical reference cavity using a spatial-mode readout technique. The experiment utilized a traveling wave cavity with a finesse of approximately 10,000, housed in a thermally controlled vacuum chamber. The tilt locking method in a double pass configuration has promising performance in the 100 µHz–1 Hz band, including surpassing the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Follow-On laser ranging interferometer requirement. Tilt locking offers a number of benefits such as high sensitivity, low cost, and simple implementation and therefore should be considered for future applications requiring high performance laser locking, such as future laser-based satellite geodesy missions and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.