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arXiv:1107.5176 · New Journal of Physics

Locking the local oscillator phase to the atomic phase via weak measurement

N Shiga, M Takeuchi

Published Feb 15, 2012• 34 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A new method is proposed to reduce the frequency noise of a local oscillator to the level of white phase noise by maintaining (not destroying by projective measurement) the coherence of the ensemble pseudo-spin of atoms over many measurement cycles. This method, which we call 'atomic phase lock (APL)', uses weak measurement to monitor the phase in the Ramsey method and repeat the cycle without initialization of the phase. APL will achieve white phase noise as long as the noise accumulated during dead time and the decoherence are smaller than the measurement noise. A numerical simulation confirmed that with APL, the Allan deviation is averaged down at a maximum rate that is proportional to the inverse of the total measurement time, τ −1 . In contrast, current atomic clocks that use projection measurement suppress the noise only to the white frequency noise level, in which case the Allan deviation scales as τ −1/2 . Faraday rotation is one way to achieve weak measurement for APL. The strength of Faraday rotation with 171 Yb + ions trapped in a linear rf-trap is evaluated, and the performance of APL is discussed. The main source of decoherence is a spontaneous emission, induced by the probe beam for Faraday rotation measurement. The Faraday rotation measurement can be repeated until the decoherence becomes comparable to the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurement. The number of cycles for a realistic experimental parameter is estimated to be ∼100.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/14/2/023034

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arXiv:1303.6357•Mar 26, 2013•19 citations
A new method is proposed to reduce the frequency noise of a local oscillator to the level of white phase noise by maintaining (not destroying by projective measurement) the coherence of the ensemble pseudo-spin of atoms over many measurement cycles. This method, which we call 'atomic phase lock (APL)', uses weak measurement to monitor the phase in the Ramsey method and repeat the cycle without initialization of the phase. APL will achieve white phase noise as long as the noise accumulated during dead time and the decoherence are smaller than the measurement noise. A numerical simulation confirmed that with APL, the Allan deviation is averaged down at a maximum rate that is proportional to the inverse of the total measurement time, τ −1 . In contrast, current atomic clocks that use projection measurement suppress the noise only to the white frequency noise level, in which case the Allan deviation scales as τ −1/2 . Faraday rotation is one way to achieve weak measurement for APL. The strength of Faraday rotation with 171 Yb + ions trapped in a linear rf-trap is evaluated, and the performance of APL is discussed. The main source of decoherence is a spontaneous emission, induced by the probe beam for Faraday rotation measurement. The Faraday rotation measurement can be repeated until the decoherence becomes comparable to the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurement. The number of cycles for a realistic experimental parameter is estimated to be ∼100.
We propose a new method to reduce the frequency noise of a Local Oscillator (LO) to the level of white phase noise by maintaining (not destroying by projective measurement) the coherence of the ensemble pseudo-spin of atoms over many measurement cycles. This scheme uses weak measurement to monitor the phase in Ramsey method and repeat the cycle without initialization of phase and we call, "atomic phase lock (APL)" in this paper. APL will achieve white phase noise as long as the noise accumulated during dead time and the decoherence are smaller than the measurement noise. A numerical simulation confirms that with APL, Allan deviation is averaged down at a maximum rate that is proportional to the inverse of total measurement time, tau^-1. In contrast, the current atomic clocks that use projection measurement suppress the noise only down to the level of white frequency, in which case Allan deviation scales as tau^-1/2. Faraday rotation is one of the possible ways to realize weak measurement for APL. We evaluate the strength of Faraday rotation with 171Yb+ ions trapped in a linear rf-trap and discuss the performance of APL. The main source of the decoherence is a spontaneous emission induced by the probe beam for Faraday rotation measurement. One can repeat the Faraday rotation measurement until the decoherence become comparable to the SNR of measurement. We estimate this number of cycles to be ~100 cycles for a realistic experimental parameter.
Atomic clocks have reached the Quantum Projection Noise (QPN) limit of stability and it has been proposed to use the entangled atomic ensemble in order to overcome the QPN limit. We have proposed a new method to lock the phase of the Local Oscillator (LO) to the atomic phase and call, "atomic phase lock (APL)." This APL could possibly overcome the QPN limit without need of preparing the entangled atomic ensemble. Traditional Ramsey method destroys the coherence of the atomic spin due to the projection measurement at each cycle. This destruction and initialization of the phase at each cycle introduce additional noise and the performance of the atomic clock is limited at the white frequency noise level. APL employs dispersion measurements, i.e. Faraday rotation, in order to measure the phase difference without destroying the atomic phase. By repeating the measurement cycle with sufficiently small dead time, one can suppress the LO noise down to white phase noise level, achieving the τ-1 dependence of the Allan variance that can eventually overcome the QPN limit in long term. We are preparing a proof-of-principle experiment using the ensemble of trapped 171Yb+ ions with hyperfine splitting (12.6 GHz) as a clock transition and report the current status of the experiment as well.
We experimentally demonstrated that the stability of an atomic clock improves at its fastest rate τ −1 (where τ is the averaging time) when the phase of a local oscillator is genuinely compared to the continuous phase of many atoms in a single trap (an atomic phase lock). For this demonstration, we developed a simple method that repeatedly monitors the atomic phase while retaining its coherence by observing only a portion of the whole ion cloud. Using this new method, we measured the continuous phase over three measurement cycles, and thereby improved the stability scaling from to τ −1 during the three measurement cycles. This simple method provides a path by which atomic clocks can approach a quantum projection noise limit, even when the measurement noise is dominated by the technical noise.
Atom interferometry based sensors provide today the most precise measurements of time, inertial forces and magnetic fields. In the common approach, a superposition state is interrogated for a given time interval and finally destructively measured. Conversely, we can repeatedly probe non-destructively the same quantum system and demonstrate efficient measurement schemes using feedback. First, we protect a spin polarized atomic ensemble from the decoherence induced by a synthetic noise. After the noise action, the state of the atomic system is read out with negligible projection using a non-destructive probe, and later corrected with a coherent manipulation to restore the initial state. The efficiency of the feedback scheme is studied versus the strength of the measurement and a maximum is found from the trade-off between information gain and probe destructivity. Our feedback controller is then applied to stabilize a classical local oscillator on a collective quantum state, and this is used in an atomic clock configuration to demonstrate experimentally that in some contexts a hybrid phase and frequency lock can surpass conventional atomic clocks which rely only on a frequency lock.
Abstract The frequency stability of many optical atomic clocks is limited by the coherence of their local oscillator. Here, we present a measurement protocol that overcomes the laser coherence limit. It relies on engineered dynamical decoupling of laser phase noise and near-synchronous interrogation of two clocks. One clock coarsely tracks the laser phase using dynamical decoupling; the other refines this estimate using a high-resolution phase measurement. While the former needs to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, the latter clock may operate with any number of particles. The protocol effectively enables minute-long Ramsey interrogation for coherence times of few seconds as provided by the current best ultrastable laser systems. We demonstrate implementation of the protocol in a realistic proof-of-principle experiment, where we interrogate for 0.5 s at a laser coherence time of 77 ms. Here, a single lattice clock is used to emulate synchronous interrogation of two separate clocks in the presence of artificial laser frequency noise. We discuss the frequency instability of a single-ion clock that would result from using the protocol for stabilisation, under these conditions and for minute-long interrogation, and find expected instabilities of σy(τ) = 8 × 10−16(τ/s)−1/2 and σy(τ) = 5 × 10−17(τ/s)−1/2, respectively.
In trapped-atom clocks, the primary source of decoherence is often the phase noise of the oscillator. For this case, we derive theoretical performance gains by combining several atomic ensembles. For example, M ensembles of N atoms can be combined with a variety of probe periods, to reduce the frequency variance to M 2^-M times that of standard Ramsey clocks. A similar exponential improvement is possible if the atomic phases of some of the ensembles evolve at reduced frequencies. These ensembles may be constructed from atoms or molecules with lower-frequency transitions, or generated by dynamical decoupling. The ensembles with reduced frequency or probe period are responsible only for counting the integer number of 2 pi phase wraps, and do not affect the clock's systematic errors. Quantum phase measurement with Gaussian initial states allows for smaller ensemble sizes than Ramsey spectroscopy.