Conjugate phase-noise cancellation enables submicrometre dual-comb ranging with free-running megahertz-linewidth lasers

Abstract

Frequency-domain dual-comb ranging combines rapid acquisition with interferometric sensitivity, but high-performance implementations often rely on mutually coherent or actively stabilised comb sources. Free-running sources can reduce this hardware burden, but their phase noise and drift of the optical frequency offset can blur radio-frequency (RF) comb teeth and weaken probe-reference phase correlation. Previous phase-slope implementations have therefore relied on sufficiently resolved RF teeth, within-coherence-length probe-reference paths or explicit digital tracking of these fluctuations. Here we demonstrate a low-cost frequency-domain dual-comb ranging architecture that combines independent free-running distributed-feedback (DFB) lasers with conjugate phase-noise cancellation (CPNC). By forming a self-conjugate signal before the phases of individual RF-comb teeth are extracted, CPNC cancels the common laser phase factor and drifting optical-frequency-offset term while retaining the distance-dependent phase slope. Using electro-optic combs seeded by DFB lasers with linewidths of 12 MHz and 9 MHz, we achieve an Allan deviation of $219~\mathrm{nm}$ at $246~\mu\mathrm{s}$ and reduce the single-frame distance standard deviation from $558~\mu\mathrm{m}$ to $9.31~\mu\mathrm{m}$ with CPNC. Across the tested megahertz-linewidth configurations, CPNC delivered minimum Allan deviations below $250~\mathrm{nm}$. These results show that CPNC enables submicrometre ranging in a low-cost frequency-domain dual-comb architecture with reduced source-stabilisation and phase-management complexity.