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APS

Studies of the 5s^21S 0 -- 5s5p^3P 1 Transition in Atomic Strontium

Y. N. Martinez, Ying-Cheng Chen, P. G. Mickelson

Published May 1, 2005• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

This research utilizes the Electron Shelving (ES) technique to obtain a lifetime measurement of the 3P1 energy state of strontium. The 5s21 S0 → 5p 3 P1 intercombination transition is important because of its promising usefulness in optical frequency standards and high resolution spectroscopy. Unfortunately, the transition lacks a high photon scattering rate to produce a significant signal for optical studies and therefore it is advantageous to monitor the vastly stronger 1S 0 →1 P1 transition. This lifetime measurement yielded a value of tau = 23 +/- 3 mus (systematic uncertainty), which is longer than other current experimental values established in literature. Additional lineshape studies with a dependence on magnetic fields, gravitational acceleration, and laser power were performed and are discussed briefly. These lineshape studies allow an upper linewidth limit to be placed on the pumping laser causing this transition, making these secondary studies a useful method to characterize the laser.

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We observe the fluorescence and the saturated fluorescence spectra of (5s2)1S0(5s5p)3P1 intercombination transition of thermal strontium atomic beam. Experimental investigation of 88Sr(5s2)1S0(5s5p)3P1 intercombination transition is performed on the different experimental conditions. Our study indicates that experimental parameters affect spectra largely, including temperature, intensity of laser and scanning frequency of laser. Intensity of spectrum is reciprocal of scanning frequency of laser due to long lifetime of (5s5p)3P1 state of Sr atom. Owing to Doppler broadening, transit broadening and other experimental factors, the linewidth of (5s2)1S0(5s5p)3P1 fluorescence spectrum is far more than its natural linewidth and proportional scanning frequency of laser.

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This research utilizes the Electron Shelving (ES) technique to obtain a lifetime measurement of the 3P1 energy state of strontium. The 5s21 S0 → 5p 3 P1 intercombination transition is important because of its promising usefulness in optical frequency standards and high resolution spectroscopy. Unfortunately, the transition lacks a high photon scattering rate to produce a significant signal for optical studies and therefore it is advantageous to monitor the vastly stronger 1S 0 →1 P1 transition. This lifetime measurement yielded a value of tau = 23 +/- 3 mus (systematic uncertainty), which is longer than other current experimental values established in literature. Additional lineshape studies with a dependence on magnetic fields, gravitational acceleration, and laser power were performed and are discussed briefly. These lineshape studies allow an upper linewidth limit to be placed on the pumping laser causing this transition, making these secondary studies a useful method to characterize the laser.
We observe the fluorescence and the saturated fluorescence spectra of (5s2)1S0(5s5p)3P1 intercombination transition of thermal strontium atomic beam. Experimental investigation of 88Sr(5s2)1S0(5s5p)3P1 intercombination transition is performed on the different experimental conditions. Our study indicates that experimental parameters affect spectra largely, including temperature, intensity of laser and scanning frequency of laser. Intensity of spectrum is reciprocal of scanning frequency of laser due to long lifetime of (5s5p)3P1 state of Sr atom. Owing to Doppler broadening, transit broadening and other experimental factors, the linewidth of (5s2)1S0(5s5p)3P1 fluorescence spectrum is far more than its natural linewidth and proportional scanning frequency of laser.
We report on our progress toward the realization of an optical frequency standard referenced to strontium intercombination lines. While first frequency measurement of the weakly allowed 1S 0- 3P 1 transition was done with saturation spectroscopy on a thermal beam, we are preparing the experimental setup for high resolution spectroscopy on ultracold atoms of the doubly forbidden 1S 0- 3P 0 line. Our current setup allows the capture more than 10 7 atoms at 1 μK in 500 ms in two stages of magneto-optical trapping. We also demonstrated the dipole trapping of ultracold strontium isotopes for accurate spectroscopy and collisional measurements. A semiconductor laser source at 698 nm has already been locked to a pre-stabilization cavity obtaining a fast linewidth of less than 1 kHz. Second stage stabilization of the clock laser to ultra-high finesse cavity is in development. Recent measurement of elastic and inelastic cross-sections of the two most abundant 88Sr and 86Sr isotopes are also presented.
In this paper we present a method of observing triplet state transitions of strontium. The intercombination transition is employed to pump the atom population from singlet-state (5s2)1S0 to triplet-state (5s5p)3P1 by a laser at 689 nm. Then 688 nm laser is also employed to divide atom population into the two other triplet-state states (5s5p)3P0 and (5s5p)3PP2. We can obtain the absorption signals of triplet-state transition (5s6s)3S1 → (5s5p)3P0 and (5s6p)3S1 → (5s5p)3P3P2. And these atomic absorption signals can be used for stabilizing the repumping light 679 nm and 707 nm directly to transition line of strontium. This method can be used in the Doppler cooling of strontium atoms.
Abstract We present a spectroscopy scheme for the 7 kHz wide 689 nm intercombination line of strontium. We rely on shelving detection, where electrons are first excited to a metastable state by the spectroscopy laser before their state is probed using the broad transition at 461 nm. As in the similar setting of calcium beam clocks, this enhances dramatically the signal strength as compared to direct saturated fluorescence or absorption spectroscopy of the narrow line. We implement shelving spectroscopy both in directed atomic beams and hot vapor cells with isotropic atomic velocities. We measure a fractional frequency instability ∼2 × 10 −12 at 1s limited by technical noise—about one order of magnitude above shot noise limitations for our experimental parameters. Our work illustrates the robustness and flexibility of a scheme that can be very easily implemented in the reference cells or ovens of most existing strontium experiments, and may find applications for low-complexity clocks.
Predicting magic wavelengths accurately requires precise knowledge of electric dipole matrix elements of nearby atomic transitions. As a result, measurements of magic wavelengths allow us to test theoretical predictions for the matrix elements that frequently cannot be probed by any other methods. Here, we calculate and measure a magic wavelength near 473 nm of the $5{s}^{2}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}^{1}{S}_{0}\ensuremath{-}5s5p\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}^{3}{P}_{1}$ intercombination transition of 88Sr^{88}\mathrm{Sr}88Sr. Experimentally, we find 473.371(6) nm for $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}m=0$ ($\ensuremath{\pi}$ transition) and 473.117(15) nm for $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}m=\ensuremath{-}1$ (${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ transition). Theoretical calculations yield 473.375(22) and 473.145(20) nm, respectively. Determining magic wavelengths nearby the dominant 461-nm probe transition of 88Sr^{88}\mathrm{Sr}88Sr holds promise for state insensitive interfacing of strontium atoms and nanophotonic devices with a narrow band of operating wavelengths. Furthermore, the 3P1^{3}{P}_{1}3P1​ polarizability is dominated by the contributions to the 5p23P5{p}^{2}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}^{3}P5p23P levels, and excellent agreement of theory and experiment validates both theoretical values of these matrix elements and estimates of their uncertainties.
Optical lattice clocks based on the narrow ( 5 s 2 ) S 0 1 − ( 5 s 5 p ) P 0 3 transition in neutral strontium (Sr) are among the most precise and accurate measurement devices in existence. Although this transition is completely forbidden by selection rules, state mixing from the hyperfine interaction in Sr 87 provides a weakly allowed transition that can be coherently driven with practical clock laser intensities. While the coherent interrogation times of optical clocks are typically set by the linewidth of the probe laser, this limitation can be overcome in synchronous differential comparisons between ensembles. In such measurements the natural lifetime of the S 0 1 – P 0 3 clock transition becomes the fundamental limiting factor to the duration of a single run of the experiment. However, a direct measurement of the decay rate of the clock excited state is quite challenging due to the competing effects of other loss channels such as Raman scattering, inelastic collisions, and atom loss due to background gas. In this work, we monitor the decay of Sr atoms trapped in an optical lattice and initialized in the P 0 3 state. By making measurements of high and low density ensembles of both Sr 87 and Sr 88 across varying lattice trap depths, we isolate radiative decay, which accounts for a significant fraction of the observed decays at low depths. We obtain a natural radiative decay lifetime of 167 − 40 + 79 s for the P 0 3 clock state in Sr 87 , a value that is consistent with previously reported measurements and theoretical predictions. We also introduce an additional measurement scheme that involves repeated measurements of the ground-state population within a single experimental sequence, validating our model and the consistency of the measured rates. We expect that the techniques introduced in this work are applicable to lifetime measurements of long-lived metastable states in other atoms and ions used for clocks and quantum computing. The results presented in this work inform performance estimates of proposed gravitational wave detectors and long-baseline atom interferometers making use of Sr 87 .