The Optical Frequency Comb Inter-Satellite Link Team at the National University of Defense Technology has recently made remarkable strides in the realm of precision measurement through optical frequency combs. Their groundbreaking research has been featured in the esteemed international optics journal Light: Science & Applications.

To tackle the persistent technical challenge of ensuring the long-term, stable operation of on-chip optical frequency combs in complex settings, the research team introduced a multimodal locking framework. Leveraging a silicon nitride microcavity with a low repetition rate, they successfully engineered a highly stable on-chip optical frequency comb light source. This milestone achievement represents the inaugural instance of achieving fully locked and stable operation in intricate environments, boasting a repetition rate stability that reaches the 10^-14/10,000-second threshold.

This innovation holds significant promise for applications such as inter-satellite micrometer-level ranging and femtosecond-level time-frequency transfer, thereby providing essential device support for the forthcoming generation of optical frequency comb inter-satellite links.

The research endeavor is spearheaded by Professor Yang Jun, Associate Researcher Wang Guochao, and Researcher Jiang Tian, with doctoral candidate Tang Jian serving as the paper's lead author. The project has garnered financial backing from both the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Hunan Provincial Outstanding Youth Science Foundation.