Sub-femtometer-resolution absolute spectroscopy with sweeping electro-optic combs

Optical frequency comb with evenly spaced lines over a broad bandwidth has revolutionized the fields of optical metrology and spectroscopy. Here, we propose a fast interleaved dual-comb spectroscopy with sub-femtometer-resolution and absolute frequency, in which two electro-optic frequency combs are swept. Electrically-modulated stabilized laser enables ultrahigh resolution of 0.16 fm (or 20 kHz in optical frequency) and single-shot measurement in 90 ms. Total 20 million points are recorded spanning 3.2 nm (or 400 GHz) bandwidth, corresponding to a spectral sampling rate of 2.5 × 108 points/s under Nyquist-limitation. Besides, considering the trade-off between the measurement time and spectral resolution, a fast single-shot measurement is also realized in 1.6 ms with 8 fm (or 1 MHz) resolution. We demonstrate the 25-averaged result with 30.6 dB spectral measurement signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by reducing the filter bandwidth in demodulation. The results show great prospect for precise measurement with flexibly fast refresh time, high spectral resolution, and high SNR.