Long-term wavelength drift compensation of tunable pulsed dye laser for sodium detection lidar

•A simple and effective method for long-term wavelength drift compensation of pulsed lasers for sodium lidar is presented.•Optimization of OG signals for better laser wavelength discrimination is performed.•A digital control method is designed to precisely calibrating and efficiently locking the laser wavelength.•Wavelength drift is removed in test of 10 hours although experiment temperature varied.

Wavelength stabilization for a pulsed laser presents more challenges than that of continuous wave laser. We have developed a simple and efficient long-term wavelength drifts compensation technique for tunable pulsed dye lasers (PDL) applied in sodium detection lidar system. Wavelength calibration and locking are implemented by using optogalvanic (OG) spectroscopy in a Na hollow cathode lamp (HCL) in conjunction with a digital control software. Optimization of OG signals for better laser wavelength discrimination and feedback control is performed. Test results indicate that locking the multimode broadband PDL to the Na atomic transition corresponding to 589.158 nm is well achieved although the temperature in the laboratory is unstable. Through active compensation, the maximum wavelength drift is reduced from over 5 pm to 0.42 pm in 10 h and the maximum wavelength drift rate of the PDL is improved from 3.3 pm/h to 0.3 pm/h. It has been used to efficient sodium resonance fluorescence lidar detection. This technique is economical and easy to implement, and it provides flexible wavelength control and allows generalization for some other applications which require the wavelength of tunable pulsed lasers to be fixed at an atomic resonance transition references.