A NANO-STABILIZATION TECHNIQUE FOR LOW REPETITION RATE PHASE-SENSITIVE OPTICAL EXPERIMENTS

A nano-stabilization technique is developed for the observation of Ram sey fringes in low repetition rate Rydberg electron wavepacket experim ents. The stabilization system consists of a CCD array monitoring opti cal interference fringes of a reference CW laser beam passing through a Michelson interferometer, a PID feedback circuit generating an error voltage, and a piezo responding to the error voltage to compensate fo r geometric fluctuations in the interferometer of greater than or equa l to 15 nm with a response time approximate to 10 ms. The proficiency of the stabilized interferometer is demonstrated in an experiment to o bserve Ramsey fringes in autoionizing Rydberg states of Xe.