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Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Precision studies of stimulated-resonance Raman interactions in an atomic beam

Philip Hemmer, G. P. Ontai, Shaoul Ezekiel

Published Feb 1, 1986• 55 citations

Abstract

Precision studies of stimulated-resonance Raman interactions in a sodium atomic beam were performed with emphasis on Ramsey’s separated-field excitation. Ramsey fringes were obtained for a field separation of up to 30 cm, and the data were consistent with theoretical predictions. Possible applications of this Raman interaction to clock development also were studied by stabilizing a microwave oscillator to a Raman–Ramsey fringe. The resulting oscillator stability of 1.5 × 10−11 for a 1000-sec averaging time compares favorably with commercial cesium clocks when differences in atom transit time and transition frequency are taken into consideration. Finally, potential sources of long-term frequency error, which are important for clock applications, were also partially investigated.

DOI: 10.1364/josab.3.000219

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Precision studies of stimulated-resonance Raman interactions in a sodium atomic beam were performed with emphasis on Ramsey’s separated-field excitation. Ramsey fringes were obtained for a field separation of up to 30 cm, and the data were consistent with theoretical predictions. Possible applications of this Raman interaction to clock development also were studied by stabilizing a microwave oscillator to a Raman–Ramsey fringe. The resulting oscillator stability of 1.5 × 10−11 for a 1000-sec averaging time compares favorably with commercial cesium clocks when differences in atom transit time and transition frequency are taken into consideration. Finally, potential sources of long-term frequency error, which are important for clock applications, were also partially investigated.

Ramsey spectroscopy and geometric operations on the released sodium Bose–Einstein condensates consisting of 10 7 atoms were demonstrated using copropagating two-photon stimulated Raman pulses, which were resonant to the clock transition between the F =1, m F =0 and F =2, m F =0 states of sodium atoms. The Ramsey fringes with a visibility close to 1 were obtained for two Raman pulses separated by 10 ms. A relative frequency resolution of Ramsey resonance was 6×10 -10 and a phase uncertainty of fringes was 0.06 rad for single measurement. Using resonant laser-controlled Raman pulses, geometric operations for rotations of the two-level Bose–Einstein condensates around axes 2 and 3 on the Bloch sphere were also demonstrated with a relative phase uncertainty of 4%.