Online/offline injection seeding system with high frequency-stability and low crosstalk for water vapor DIAL

A compact and rugged distributed feedback (DFB) laser system has been developed as online-offline injection seeder for the laser transmitter of a ground-based water vapor differential absorption lidar (WV DIAL) near 820 nm. The frequency stability of this injection seeder system shows a standard deviation of only 6.3 MHz and a linewidth of less than 4.6 MHz during continuous operation of more than 14 h. These values by far exceed the requirements for WV DIAL. By use of a novel technique based on an electro-optic deflector (EOD), alternating online-offline wavelength switching is achieved for each shot of the seeded laser with 250 Hz with a response time of less than 10 µs and very low crosstalk between the channels of only 33 dB. As a result, a spectral purity of 99.95% is reached by the WV DIAL transmitter which again fulfills the requirements for WV DIAL measurements with high accuracy. Because moveable parts are not present in the seeding system, this setup is significantly less sensitive to acoustic vibrations and ambient temperature drifts during field experiments than other seeding systems which use external cavity diode lasers (ECDL) and mechanical switches. By our new seeding system not only the requirements for ground-based water-vapor DIAL are met but also for space-borne WV DIAL applications that pose even higher demands to the frequency stability and spectral purity of the laser transmitters.