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The optical frequency comb (OptoComb) is said to be the world’s most accurate ruler for the measurement of both frequency and time. It is a special type of laser made of sharp and evenly spaced spectral lines resembling the teeth of a comb. The OptoComb concept was discovered in 1993 by Dr Kourogi, currently Director and Honorary Fellow at XTIA. While pursuing his work as a leading researcher in optical comb technology, Dr Kourogi contributed to the research of John Hall and Theodor Hänsch, who were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, in which the development of the optical frequency comb played a major role. The OptoComb is a special kind of light that has the properties of both a monochromatic laser and polychromatic white-light. Therefore, it has the following characteristics:

・It contains light at many frequencies.

・The light of each frequency is a laser with a narrow spectral width

・The frequency intervals between each laser line are all the same

・The phase of each laser frequency is aligned.

In the time domain, the waveform of the OptoComb is a periodic train of sharp pulses with individual widths shorter than 1 picosecond, and an interval of several tens of picoseconds, as shown in the figure above. Dr Kourogi paid attention to these properties of the OptoComb and thought that if it could measure time with high precision, there was a possibility of applying it to high-precision distance measurement and 3D scanning.