Description: Based on our proprietary fiber technology and extensive experience in fiber laser development, a new single-frequency 2Ým fiber laser source will be developed. The source includes advanced frequency-locking schemes for both center-line locking and offset-frequency locking, so as to address the bandwidth issue associated with airborne and space-borne coherent lidar, i.e., Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons.

Benefits: There are a number of potential non-NASA commercial applications for frequency-stabilized single frequency 2Ým fiber laser. Our proposed frequency-stabilized 2Ým fiber source is an ideal light source for mid-infrared frequency metrology. It can also be used in gas sensing and high-precision molecular spectroscopy.

For our proposed laser source, one of the potential NASA applications is NASA's ASCENDS mission, i.e., Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons. This mission will provide a tool and data to understand the natural processes driving the variability of natural carbon sources and sinks, and the transportation of carbon through the atmosphere. It needs to measure the number density of CO2 in the column of air through CO2 column profilers from air-borne or space-borne platforms. Our proposed laser system could be a perfect source enabling to use large-collection-area photo receiver in air-borne or space-borne CO2 coherent lidars for column measurements.