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We stabilized the carrier-envelope phase of the pulses emitted by a femtosecond mode-locked laser by using the powerful tools of frequency-domain laser stabilization. We confirmed control of the pulse-to-pulse carrier-envelope phase using temporal cross correlation. This phase stabilization locks the absolute frequencies emitted by the laser, which we used to perform absolute optical frequency measurements that were directly referenced to a stable microwave clock.

Squeezed states of the electromagnetic fieM are generated by degenerate parametric down conversion in an optical cavity. Noise reductions greater than 50% relative to the vacuum noise level are observed in a balanced homodyne detector. A quantitative comparison with theory suggests that the observed squeezing results from a field that in the absence of linear attenuation would be squeezed by greater then tenfold.

We demonstrate a great simplification in the long-standing problem of measuring optical frequencies in terms of the cesium primary standard. An air-silica microstructure optical fiber broadens the frequency comb of a femtosecond laser to span the optical octave from 1064 to 532 nm, enabling us to measure the 282 THz frequency of an iodine-stabilized Nd:YAG laser directly in terms of the microwave frequency that controls the comb spacing. Additional measurements of established optical frequencies at 633 and 778 nm using the same femtosecond comb confirm the accepted uncertainties for these standards.

Four long-running currents in laser technology met and merged in 1999-2000. Two of these were the quest toward a stable repetitive sequence of ever-shorter optical pulses and, on the other hand, the quest for the most time-stable, unvarying optical frequency possible. The marriage of UltraFast and UltraStable lasers was brokered mainly by two international teams and became exciting when a special "designer" microstructure optical fiber was shown to be nonlinear enough to produce "white light" from the femtosecond laser pulses, such that the output spectrum embraced a full optical octave. Then, for the first time, one could realize an optical frequency interval equal to the comb's lowest frequency, and count out this interval as a multiple of the repetition rate of the femtosecond pulse laser. This "gear-box" connection between the radio frequency standard and any/all optical frequency standards came just as Sensitivity-Enhancing ideas were maturing. The four-way Union empowered an explosion of accurate frequency measurement results in the standards field and prepares the way for refined tests of some of our cherished physical principles, such as the time-stability of some of the basic numbers in physics ͑e.g., the "fine-structure" constant, the speed of light, certain atomic mass ratios etc.͒, and the equivalence of time-keeping by clocks based on different physics. The stable laser technology also allows time-synchronization between two independent femtosecond lasers so exact they can be made to appear as if the source were a single laser. By improving pump/probe experiments, one important application will be in bond-specific spatial scanning of biological samples. This next decade in optical physics should be a blast.

Although a single-mode optical fiber is a convenient and efficient interface/connecting medium, it introduces phase-noise modulation, which corrupts high-precision frequency-based applications by broadening the spectrum toward the kilohertz domain. We describe a simple double-pass fiber noise measurement and control system, which is demonstrated to provide millihertz accuracy of noise cancellation.

We consider several highly sensitive techniques commonly used in detection of atomic and molecular absorptions. Their basic operating principles and corresponding performances are summarized and compared. We then present our latest results on the ultrasensitive detection of molecular overtone transitions to illustrate the principle and application of the cavity-enhanced frequency-modulation (FM) spectroscopy. An external cavity is used to enhance the molecular response to the light field, and an FM technique is applied for shotnoise-limited signal recovery. A perfect match between the FM sideband frequency and the cavity free spectral range makes the detection process insensitive to the laser-frequency noise relative to the cavity, and, at the same time, overcomes the cavity bandwidth limit. Working with a 1.064-m Nd:YAG laser, we obtained sub-Doppler overtone resonances of C 2 HD, C 2 H 2 , and CO 2 molecules. A detection sensitivity of 5 ϫ 10 Ϫ13 of integrated absorption (1 ϫ 10 Ϫ14 /cm) over 1-s averaging time has been achieved.

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