High-efficiency electro-optic amplitude modulation with delayed coherent addition

Amplitude modulation of laser light is required for resonant sideband extraction employed in gravitational-wave detectors. Amplitude modulation with electro-optic phase modulators is realized by interferometric phase-to-amplitude conversion. Although two outputs modulated at opposite phases to each other are obtained, usually only one of them is utilized and the other is abandoned. The reuse of this abandoned light improves the power efficiency of the modulation. This can be realized by inverting the modulation phase of one output with a delay line and adding it to the other coherently. Moreover, this system selects a high-efficiency operating point and modulates the light in a linear range. We demonstrate that the modulation system can be operated with a power loss that is due only to the losses of the optical components.