Development of a frequency-stabilized 555.8-nm laser

Experiments on developing a frequency-stabilized 555.8-nm laser are presented. The 555.8-nm laser is obtained by frequency doubling of a 1111.6-nm diode laser through single-passing a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide. The 555.8-nm laser is then locked to a stable high-finesse Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity by the Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) technique. The finesse of the cavity is measured by the heterodyne cavity ring-down spectroscopy technique. The linewidth of the 555.8-nm laser is investigated. After the laser is locked, the laser line width is reduced to about 3 kHz. This frequency-stabilized 555.8-nm laser is used in experiments on the laser cooling and trapping of ytterbium atoms to develop an ytterbium optical clock.