Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Optical lattice clocks toward 10-17uncertainty
Masao Takamoto, Tomoya Akatsuka, Hidekazu Hachisu, Hidetoshi Katori
Abstract
We discuss two possible configurations for optical lattice clocks; a one-dimensional (1D) lattice loaded with spinpolarized fermions, and a three-dimensional (3D) lattice loaded with bosons. In the former scheme, collisional frequency shifts are suppressed by the quantum statistical property of identical fermions. This Pauli blocking of collisions is critically dependent on the degree of spin polarization of the fermionic atoms, which we carefully investigated in the Rabi excitation process of the clock transition. In the latter scheme, a single occupancy lattice suppresses bunching of bosons and collisional frequency shifts. We demonstrate a frequency comparison of these two optical lattice clocks based on fermionic 87Sr and bosonic 88Sr. Operating these clocks parallely has yielded a stability approaching 10−17. Such measurements are an important step to ascertain the lattice clocks' uncertainty at the 10−17 level and beyond.