Abstract
Orbiting planets induce a weak radial velocity (RV) shift in the host star that provides a powerful method of planet detection. Importantly, the RV technique provides information about the exoplanet mass, which is unavailable with the complementary technique of transit photometry. However, RV detection of an Earth-like planet in the ‘habitable zone’ 1 requires extreme spectroscopic precision that is only possible using a laser frequency comb (LFC) 2 . Conventional LFCs require complex filtering steps to be compatible with astronomical spectrographs, but a new chip-based microresonator device, the Kerr soliton microcomb 3–8 , is an ideal match for astronomical spectrograph resolution and can eliminate these filtering steps. Here, we demonstrate an atomic/molecular line-referenced soliton microcomb for calibration of astronomical spectrographs. These devices can ultimately provide LFC systems that would occupy only a few cubic centimetres 9,10 , thereby greatly expanding implementation of these technologies into remote and mobile environments beyond the research lab.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 25-30 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Nature Photonics |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2019 |
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge J. Schlieder, A. Howard, F. Hadaegh and the support of the entire Keck summit team. We thank D. Carlson and H. Timmers for preparing the HNLF. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. The data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W.M. Keck Foundation. This paper made use of data available in the NASA Exoplanet Archive and the Keck Observatory Archive. S.D. and S.P. acknowledge support from NIST. K.V., M.-G.S., X.Y. and Y.-H.L. thank the Kavli Nanoscience Institute and NASA for support under KJV.JPLNASA-1-JPL.1459106. This research was carried out at JPL and the California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA and funded through the JPL Research and Technology Development Program.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics