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Journal of the European Optical Society Rapid Publications

Improved rubidium atomic beam clock based on lamp-pumping and fluorescence-detection scheme

Y. H. Wang, Jiayao Huang, Y. J. Gu, S. Q. Liu, Taige Dong, Zhipeng Lü

Published Jan 1, 2011• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A compact, portable rubidium atomic beam clock based on lamp-pumping and fluorescence-detection scheme is proposed. The expected short-term frequency stability can be at least three orders of magnitude better than that of previous experimental results. The usages of lamp pumping, fluorescence detection and microwave slow-wave resonance structures make this design robust and compact.

DOI
10.2971/jeos.2011.11005

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Joint Conference of the European Frequency and Time Forum and IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (EFTF/IFCS)•May 1, 2011•0 citations
A compact, portable rubidium atomic beam clock based on lamp-pumping and fluorescence-detection scheme is proposed. The expected short-term frequency stability can be at least three orders of magnitude better than that of previous experimental results. The usages of lamp pumping, fluorescence detection and microwave slow-wave resonance structures make this design robust and compact.
The paper presents the realisation of a high-performance vapour-cell atomic frequency standard demonstrator based on laser optical pumping. The development of such devices aims to fully exploit the advantages of using a narrow-band diode laser pump light source instead of the discharge lamps commonly used in Rb gas-cell clocks. These advantages include improved control over the pump light spectrum, higher selectivity of the optical pumping, and increased signal contrast, and thus show the potential for the realisation of Rb atomic clocks with improved short-term frequency stability.
A rubidium-beam microwave clock, optically pumped by a distributed feedback diode laser, is experimentally investigated. The clock is composed of a physical package, optical systems, and electric servo loops. The physical package realizes the microwave interrogation of a rubidium-atomic beam. The optical systems, equipped with two 780-nm distributed feedback laser diodes, yield light for pumping and detecting. The servo loops control the frequency of a local oscillator with respect to the microwave spectrum. With the experimental systems, the microwave spectrum, which has an amplitude of 4 nA and a line width of 700 Hz, is obtained. Preliminary tests show that the clock short-term frequency stability is 7 × 10 −11 at 1 s, and 3 × 10 −12 at 1000 s. These experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme for a manufactured clock.
We report our investigations on a compact high-performance rubidium (Rb) vapourcell clock based on microwave-optical double-resonance (DR).These studies are done in both DR continuous-wave (CW) and Ramsey schemes using the same Physics Package (PP), with the same Rb vapour cell and a magnetron-type cavity with only 45 cm 3 external volume.In the CW-DR scheme, we demonstrate a DR signal with a contrast of 26% and a linewidth of 334 Hz; in Ramsey-DR mode Ramsey signals with higher contrast up to 35% and a linewidth of 160 Hz have been demonstrated.Short-term stabilities of 1.4×10 -13 τ -1/2 and 2.4×10 -13 τ -1/2 are measured for CW-DR and Ramsey-DR schemes, respectively.In the Ramsey-DR operation, thanks to the separation of light and microwave interactions in time, the light-shift effect has been suppressed which allows improving the long-term clock stability as compared to CW-DR operation.Implementations in miniature atomic clocks are considered. IntroductionSince the first invention of lamp-pumped rubidium (Rb) clocks in the 1960's [1,2], the demand for a stable, reliable, and compact Rb frequency standard with low power consumption has been growing, for various applications fields such as industry, telecommunication, navigation, space applications (e.g.GPS [3], GALILEO [4] and COMPASS [5]).Recently, thanks to the semiconductor laser technology, laser-pumped Rb clocks have been considered in several studies, for their better optical pumping efficiency results in short-term frequency stabilities at least one order of magnitude better than their lamp-pumped counterparts [6][7][8][9].This opened up also several new schemes for vapour-cell atomic clocks, such as the continuous-wave (CW) Rb clock [9], coherent population trapping (CPT) Cs clock [10] and pulsed optical pumping (POP) Rb clock [11].In this paper we report our studies on high-performance Rb frequency standards based on the laser-microwave double-resonance (DR) scheme, using both CW and Ramsey interrogation.Both CW-DR and Ramsey-DR schemes require two resonant electromagnetic fields of light and microwave.In the case of CW-DR, the laser optically pumps the vapour of the Rb atoms by creating a polarization of the atomic ground-state; simultaneously the microwave field, generated from a quartz oscillator and is near-resonant with the 87 Rb hyperfine clock transition (energy levels 5 2 S 1/2 │F g =1, m F =0˃ ↔│F g =2, m F =0˃), is applied.The opacity of the Rb vapour to the transmitted light signal as a function of microwave frequency is a measure of the atomic ground state polarization known as CW-DR signal [9].In CW-DR, the steps of optical pumping, microwave interrogation and optical detection are applied simultaneously (figure 1(b)).In the case of Ramsey-DR, these three sequences are separated in time, see figure 1(c): first, during optical pumping a strong laser pulse creates a significant atom population imbalance between
We present our recently experimental results on a DFB laser diode pumped Rubidium atomic frequency standard. Our experiment was based on a homemade lamp-pumped Rubidium frequency standard with the discharge lamp assembly removed. In the experiment, we first locked a DFB laser diode to the87Rb cycling transition (5S1/2, F=2→5P3/2, F=3) by means of saturation absorption locking technique. After that, we optimized the parameters carefully related to the clock performance, such as temperature of the physical package, amplitude of the modulation signal for the laser locking. The preliminary short-term stability of our clock is measured 5.25×10−12τ−1/2(1s<τ<100s).