Design of the new NIM6 fountain with collecting atoms from a 3D MOT loading optical molasses

William A. Peterson, Jonathan Wrubel

Fang Fang, Weiliang Chen, Kun Liu +3 more

We report the design of a new cesium fountain clock NIM6, which is under construction in NIM. Besides some improvements on the vacuum system, Ramsey cavity and microwave synthesizer to reduce the Type B uncertainty. Another major improvement on NIM6 is to collect more atoms from a MOT loading optical molasses and optical pumping to get a better signal to noise ratio at the detection. The atom distribution will be more uniform compared with a 2D MOT loading optical molasses, and the diameter of the cloud can be adjusted by the intensity and detuning of lights during the post cooling to keep the collisional-induced frequency shift low. The atom numbers can be further increased by a new de-pumping - optical pumping procedure to pump atoms to the |F=3, mF=0> clock state directly. With a new cryogenic sapphire oscillator (CSO) based frequency synthesizer, NIM6 is aiming to reach the quantum projection noise, thus leading to a reduced Type A uncertainty compared with NIM5.

Fang Fang, Weiliang Chen, Kun Liu +3 more

In this paper, we introduce the design of our new fountain clock NIM6. Besides some improvements on the vacuum system, Ramsey cavity to reduce the Type B uncertainty, NIM6 collects atoms from a MOT loading optical molasses to get a better signal to noise ratio. The atom density will be more uniform compared to a 2D MOT loading optical molasses, and the diameter of the cloud can be adjusted by the intensity and detuning of lights during the post cooling after MOT to keep the collisional shift low. Cs atoms are collected in the lower MOT chamber for 0.5 second, and then the MOT magnetic field is turned down. Atoms are accelerated for 1 ms in a moving molasses, and further cooled for another 1.5 ms by adiabatically reducing the cooling beam intensities and red offsetting the frequencies.

P. L. Gould, Paul D. Lett, William D. Phillips

Fang Fang, Weiliang Chen, Kun Liu +4 more

A new fountain clock NIM6 is under construction. Besides some improvements on the vacuum system, a new Ramsey cavity and a microwave synthesizer are made to reduce the Type B uncertainty. Another feature of NIM6 is collecting atoms from a MOT loading optical molasses to get more atoms with a more uniform density distribution. With a new ultra-stable microwave frequency synthesizer based on cryogenic sapphire oscillator (CSO) or ultra-stable laser, NIM6 is aiming to reach the quantum projection noise, thus leading to a reduced Type A uncertainty.

William D. Phillips, Paul D. Lett, S. L. Rolston +7 more