Date of Award

12-2011

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics

Advisor(s)

Paul Allen Souder

Keywords

Fabry-Perot Cavity System, Green laser

Subject Categories

Physics

Abstract

A high finesse Fabry-Perot cavity with a frequency doubled green laser (CW, 532 nm) have been built and installed in Hall A of Jefferson Lab for high precision Compton polarimetry project in spring of 2010. It provides a high intensity circularly polarized photon target for measuring the polarization of electron beam with energies from 1.0 GeV to 11.0 GeV in a nondestructive manner. The IR beam (CW, 1064 nm) from a Ytterbium doped fiber laser amplifier seeded by a Nd:YAG narrow linewidth NPRO laser is frequency doubled in by a single-pass Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate (PPMgLN) crystal. The maximum achieved green power at 5 W IR pump power was 1.74 W with a total conversion efficiency of 34.8%. The frequency locking of this green light to the cavity resonance frequency is achieved by giving a feedback to Nd:YAG crystal via laser piezoelectric (PZT) actuator by Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) technique. The data shows the maximum amplification gain of our cavity is about 4,000 with a corresponding maximum intra-cavity power of 3.7 kW. The polarization transfer function has been measured in order to determine the intra-cavity laser polarization within the measurement uncertainty of 0.7%. The PREx experiment at JLab, used this system for the first time and achieved 1.0% precision in electron beam polarization measurement at 1.0 GeV.

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