A frequency comb allows a direct link from radio frequency standards to optical frequencies.  Current frequency standards such as atomic clocks operate in the microwave region of the spectrum, and the frequency comb brings the accuracy of such clocks into the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum. A simple electronic feedback loop can lock the repetition rate to a frequency standard.
There are two distinct applications of this technique. One is the optical clock, where an optical frequency is overlapped with a single tooth of the comb on a photodiode, and a radio frequency is compared to the beat signal, the repetition rate, and the CEO-frequency (carrier–envelope offset). Applications for the frequency-comb technique include optical metrology, frequency-chain generation, optical atomic clocks, high-precision spectroscopy, and more precise GPS technology.
The other is doing experiments with few-cycle pulses, like above-threshold ionization, attosecond pulses, highly efficient nonlinear optics or high-harmonics generation. These can be single pulses, so that no comb exists, and therefore it is not possible to define a carrier–envelope offset frequency, rather the carrier–envelope offset phase is important. A second photodiode can be added to the setup to gather phase and amplitude in a single shot, or difference-frequency generation can be used to even lock the offset on a single-shot basis, albeit with low power efficiency.
Without an actual comb one can look at the phase vs frequency. Without a carrier–envelope offset all frequencies are cosines. This means that all frequencies have the phase zero. The time origin is arbitrary. If a pulse comes at later times, the phase increases linearly with frequency, but still the zero-frequency phase is zero. This phase at zero frequency is the carrier–envelope offset. The second harmonic not only has twice the frequency, but also twice the phase. Thus for a pulse with zero offset the second harmonic of the low-frequency tail is in phase with the fundamental of the high-frequency tail, and otherwise it is not. Spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER) measures how the phase increases with frequency, but it cannot determine the offset, so the name “electric field reconstruction” is a bit misleading.
In recent years, the frequency comb has been garnering interest for astro-comb applications, extending the use of the technique as a spectrographic observational tool in astronomy.
There are other applications that do not need to lock the carrier–envelope offset frequency to a radio-frequency signal. These include, among others, optical communications, the synthesis of optical arbitrary waveforms, spectroscopy (especially dual-comb spectroscopy) or radio-frequency photonics.
On the other hand, optical frequency combs have found new applications in remote sensing. Ranging lidars based on dual comb spectroscopy have been developed, enabling high-resolution range measurements at fast update rates. Optical frequency combs can also be utilized to measure greenhouse gas emissions with great precision. For instance, in 2019, scientists at NIST employed spectroscopy to quantify methane emissions from oil and gas fields . More recently, a greenhouse gas lidar based on electro-optic combs has been successfully demonstrated.