Over the last century, our efforts to understand the spectrum of simple atomic systems such as hydrogen have led to the development of quantum mechanics, quantum-electrodynamics, and to the precise determination of fundamental constants. Constant improvements in both experimental techniques and theoretical models have pushed the precision of measurements and calculations to an astonishing level. The development of the frequency comb laser in 2000 has been instrumental for precision spectroscopy, as it solved a long-standing issue of measuring optical frequencies in terms of the Cs primary standard. Instead of using such a laser as an “optical ruler”, one can also use its pulsed output for direct frequency comb spectroscopy.
I will talk about the working principle of these frequency comb lasers, and how we plan on using them to perform the first measurement of the 1S-2S transition in He+, which was the subject of my PhD research.