Optical interferometry enables highly accurate non-contact displacement measurement. The optical phase ambiguity needs to be resolved for absolute distance ranging. In controlled laboratory conditions and for short distances it is possible to track a non-interrupted displacement from a reference position to a remote target. With large distances covered in field applications this may not be feasible, e.g. in structure monitoring, large scale industrial manufacturing or aerospace navigation and attitude control. We use an optical frequency comb source to explore absolute distance measurement by means of a combined spectral and multi-wavelength homodyne interferometry. This relaxes the absolute distance ambiguity to a few tens of centimeters, covered by simpler electronic distance meters, while maintaining highly accurate optical phase measuring capability. A virtually imaged phased array spectrometer records a spatially dispersed interferogram in a single exposure and allows for resolving the modes of our near infrared comb source with 1 GHz mode separation. This enables measurements with direct traceability of the atomic clock referenced comb source. We observed agreement within 500 nm in comparison with a commercial displacement interferometer for target distances up to 50 m. Furthermore, we report on current work toward applicability in less controlled conditions. A filter cavity decimates the comb source to an increased mode separation larger than 20 GHz. A simple grating spectrometer then allows to record mode-resolved interferograms.@en

Homodyne interferometry with a frequency comb as multi-wavelength source is a powerful method to measure long distances with high accuracy. The measurement principle requires that individual comb modes are spectrally resolved, making hundreds or thousands of accurately known wavelengths available for interferometry. For this reason the method cannot be applied directly to frequency combs with a low repetition rate (e.g. 100 MHz), since the modes are too close to be resolved. In this paper we use cavity mode filtering to increasing the pulse repetition rate of a comb and we apply the filtered comb for mode-resolved absolute distance measurement. Mode-filtering takes place with a single Fabry-Pérot cavity in a Vernier configuration, allowing to set mode spacings ranging from 10s of GHz to more than 100 GHz. Large mode-spacings significantly reduce the requirements on the resolution of the spectrometer. We demonstrate absolute long distance measurement with a mode-filtered frequency comb using a simple array spectrometer for mode-resolved detection. Here a 1 GHz comb is used, that is converted into a 56 GHz comb by mode-filtering. A trade-o between non-ambiguity range and spectral resolution needs to be made when choosing a filter ratio. The pulse-to-pulse distance after filtering is 5.3 mm in this case, so to overcome ambiguity a rough measurement with an accuracy of about 2.5 mm is required. We show that in comparison to a conventional counting interferometer an agreement within 0.5 µm for distances up to 50 m is found. The presented method may enable the field application of low-repetition rate frequency comb lasers, like fiber lasers, for multi-wavelength homodyne interferometry. It relaxes the requirements on the spectral resolution, allowing for simple grating spectrometers as detector.@en