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Chinese Physics B

Automatic compensation of magnetic field for a rubidium space cold atom clock

Lin Li, Jingwei Ji, Wei Ren, Xin Zhao, Xiangkai Peng, Jingfeng Xiang, Desheng Lü, Liang Liu

Published Jul 1, 2016• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

When the cold atom clock operates in microgravity around the near-earth orbit, its performance will be affected by the fluctuation of magnetic field. A strategy is proposed to suppress the fluctuation of magnetic field by additional coils, whose current is changed accordingly to compensate the magnetic fluctuation by the linear and incremental compensation. The flight model of the cold atom clock is tested in a simulated orbital magnetic environment and the magnetic field fluctuation in the Ramsey cavity is reduced from 17 nT to 2 nT, which implied the uncertainty due to the second order Zeeman shift is reduced to be less than 2 × 10 −16 . In addition, utilizing the compensation, the magnetic field in the trapping zone can be suppressed from 7.5 μT to less than 0.3 μT to meet the magnetic field requirement of polarization gradients cooling of atoms.

DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/25/7/073201

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When the cold atom clock operates in microgravity around the near-earth orbit, its performance will be affected by the fluctuation of magnetic field. A strategy is proposed to suppress the fluctuation of magnetic field by additional coils, whose current is changed accordingly to compensate the magnetic fluctuation by the linear and incremental compensation. The flight model of the cold atom clock is tested in a simulated orbital magnetic environment and the magnetic field fluctuation in the Ramsey cavity is reduced from 17 nT to 2 nT, which implied the uncertainty due to the second order Zeeman shift is reduced to be less than 2 × 10 −16 . In addition, utilizing the compensation, the magnetic field in the trapping zone can be suppressed from 7.5 μT to less than 0.3 μT to meet the magnetic field requirement of polarization gradients cooling of atoms.
Abstract Atomic clocks based on laser-cooled atoms are widely used as primary frequency standards. Deploying such cold atom clocks (CACs) in space is foreseen to have many applications. Here we present tests of a CAC operating in space. In orbital microgravity, the atoms are cooled, trapped, launched, and finally detected after being interrogated by a microwave field using the Ramsey method. Perturbing influences from the orbital environment on the atoms such as varying magnetic fields and the passage of the spacecraft through Earth’s radiation belt are also controlled and mitigated. With appropriate parameters settings, closed-loop locking of the CAC is realized in orbit and an estimated short-term frequency stability close to 3.0 × 10 −13 τ −1/2 has been attained. The demonstration of the long-term operation of cold atom clock in orbit opens possibility on the applications of space-based cold atom sensors.
Since the atomic clock was invented, its performance has been improved for one digit every decade until 90s of last century when the traditional atomic clock almost reached its limit. With laser cooled atoms, the performance can be further improved, and nowadays the cold atom based clocks are widely used as primary frequency standards. Such a kind of cold atom clocks has great applications in space. This paper presents the design and tests of a cold atom clock (CAC) operating in space. In microgravity, the atoms are cooled, trapped, launched and finally detected after being interrogated by microwave field with Ramsey method. The results of laser cooling of atoms in microgravity in orbit are presented and compared with that on ground for the first time. That the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of obtained central Ramsey fringes varies linearly with launching velocity of cold atoms shows the effects of microgravity. With appropriate parameters, a closed-loop locking of the CAC is realized in orbit and the estimated short term frequency stability of 3.0×10−13/τ3.0\times 10 ^{-13}/\sqrt{τ}3.0×10−13/τ​ has been reached.
We demonstrate control of the differential Zeeman shift between clock states of ultracold rubidium atoms by means of nonresonant microwave dressing. Using the dc field dependence of the microwave detuning, we suppress the first- and second-order differential Zeeman shift in magnetically trapped 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms. By dressing the state pair 5S1/25{S}_{1/2}5S1/2​ F=1F=1F=1, ${m}_{F}=\ensuremath{-}1$ and F=2F=2F=2, mF=1{m}_{F}=1mF​=1, a residual frequency spread of <0.1<0.1<0.1 Hz in a range of 100 mG around a chosen magnetic offset field can be achieved. This is one order of magnitude smaller than the shift of the bare states at the magic field of the Breit-Rabi parabola. We further identify double magic points, around which the clock frequency is insensitive to fluctuations both in the magnetic field and in the dressing Rabi frequency. The technique is compatible with chip-based cold-atom systems and allows the creation of clock and qubit states with reduced sensitivity to magnetic-field noise.
Cold atom experiments usually need a controllable and low-noise bias magnetic field to provide a quantization axis. Most labs need home-made stabilization of the field according to the actual setup, as commercially available power supply cannot directly satisfy their requirements. Here, by measuring the field fluctuations and active feedback modulating current supply of the applied magnetic field, we successfully demonstrate a field of 10.58 G with a stability to the level of 2.8 × 10−7 in a duration of 5 min. The root mean square noise is reduced to 0.05 mG, compared to the noise of 1.3 mG without stabilization. The coherence time of the magnetic-field sensitive transition between the rubidium ground states F=1,mF=−1 and 1,0, as measured by Rabi oscillation, is extended to 19.2 ms from the unstabilized value of 1.3 ms. This result is long enough for most experiments on quantum simulation and precision measurement. As our system has no passive magnetic shielding and additional compensation coils, it is highly simple and compact to provide the stable magnetic field and would be adapted to various applications with cold atoms.
Accurate control of magnetic fields is crucial for cold-atom experiments, often necessitating custom-designed control systems due to limitations in commercially available power supplies.Here, we demonstrate precise and flexible control of a static magnetic field by employing a field-programmable gate array and a feedback loop.This setup enables us to maintain exceptionally stable current with a fractional stability of 1 ppm within 30 s.The error signal of the feedback loop exhibited a noise level of 10 -5 A•Hz -1/2 for control bandwidths below 10 kHz.Utilizing this precise magnetic field control system, we investigate the second-order Zeeman shift in the context of cold-atom coherent population-trapping (CPT) clocks.Our analysis reveals the second-order Zeeman coefficient to be 574.21Hz/G 2 , with an uncertainty of 1.36 Hz/G 2 .Consequently, the magnetic field stabilization system we developed allows us to achieve a second-order Zeeman shift below 10 -14 , surpassing the long-term stability of current cold-atom CPT clocks.
Cold-atom quantum memories require a near-zero magnetic environment (residual field <1 microtesla) to mitigate Zeeman decoherence. Conventional three-axis active compensation suffers from inter-coil crosstalk and geomagnetic drift, which degrade the uniformity and long-term stability of the zero-field region. To address this, we propose a spatiotemporally cooperative feedback-controlled suppression architecture for magnetic interference. An integrally printed three-dimensional orthogonal coil frame mechanically suppresses inter-axis flux leakage. A spatial feedforward inverse matrix is introduced to algorithmically eliminate first-order cross-coupling. A dual-threshold hysteresis incremental-PI controller filters magnetometer quantization fluctuations and avoids frequent small jitter adjustments of coil driving currents. Hardware ablation experiments, long-duration stability tests and spatial magnetic-field mapping were conducted. Experimental results show that during a 714.4 s continuous steady-hold stage, the mean and maximum residual fields at the central point reach 0.112 microtesla and 0.224 microtesla, respectively. The overlapping Allan deviations of all three components remain below 5 nT for averaging times of 1.9-178.2 s. Based on differential-ferrofluid lattice-scan measurements combined with centre-constrained quadratic vector reconstruction and soft Maxwell regularization, a weak-field spatial distribution with an RMS variation of 5.65 microtesla is fitted within a spherical region of interest of radius 5 mm, where 67.5% of the model volume meets the sub-5 microtesla coverage criterion. For a prolate ellipsoidal region matching the atomic-cloud distribution with full axis lengths of 10, 5, and 5 mm, the upper field bound within 93.7% of the volume is 2.68 microtesla.