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Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Laser-Controlled Cold Ytterbium Atom Source for Transportable Optical Clocks

Masami Yasuda, Takehiko Tanabe, Takumi Kobayashi, Daisuke Akamatsu, Takumi Sato, A. Hatakeyama

Published Nov 28, 2017• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate the cold emission of ytterbium atomic vapors from ytterbium oxide irradiated with a simple ultraviolet diode laser. Slow atoms are trapped by a magneto-optical trap using a dipole-allowed transition at 399 nm. The number of trapped atoms is larger than those loaded from a conventional Zeeman slower. This method will open the way for the development of a compact apparatus suited for transportable optical clocks and other applications.

DOI
10.7566/jpsj.86.125001

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Journal of the Korean Physical Society•Nov 1, 2015•1 citation
We demonstrate the cold emission of ytterbium atomic vapors from ytterbium oxide irradiated with a simple ultraviolet diode laser. Slow atoms are trapped by a magneto-optical trap using a dipole-allowed transition at 399 nm. The number of trapped atoms is larger than those loaded from a conventional Zeeman slower. This method will open the way for the development of a compact apparatus suited for transportable optical clocks and other applications.
We report the realization of ytterbium magneto-optical trap (MOT) operating on the dipole-allowed 1 S 0 — 1 P 1 transition at 398.9 nm. The MOT is loaded by a slowed atomic beam produced by a Zeeman slower. All seven stable isotopes of Yb atoms could be trapped separately at different laser detuning values. Over 10 7 174 Yb atoms are collected in the MOT, whereas the atom number of fermionic isotope 171 Yb is roughly 2.3 × 10 6 due to a lower abundance. Without the Zeeman slower, the trapped atom numbers are one order of magnitude lower. Both the even and odd isotopes are recognized as excellent candidates of optical clock transition, so the cooling and trapping of ytterbium atoms by the blue MOT is an important step for building an optical clock.
Precision timekeeping has been a driving force in innovation, from defining agricultural seasons to atomic clocks enabling satellite navigation, broadband communication and high-speed trading. We are on the verge of a revolution in atomic timekeeping, where optical clocks promise an over thousand-fold improvement in stability and accuracy. However, complex setups and sensitivity to thermal radiation pose limitations to progress. Here we report on an atom source for a strontium optical lattice clock which circumvents these limitations. We demonstrate fast (sub 100 ms), cold and controlled emission of strontium atomic vapours from bulk strontium oxide irradiated by a simple low power diode laser. Our results demonstrate that millions of strontium atoms from the vapour can be captured in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). Our method enables over an order of magnitude reduction in scale of the apparatus. Future applications range from satellite clocks testing general relativity to portable clocks for inertial navigation systems and relativistic geodesy.
A compact laser cooling system for transportable optical lattice clocks based on cold 171 Yb atoms has been presented. The system size has been reduced by eliminating the first cooling stage and using compact configurations for the main subsystems of the laser cooling system. A Zeeman slower has been modeled and developed, reducing the velocity of atoms from a thermal source to a level sufficient for their direct capture in a second-stage magneto-optical trap, avoiding the first cooling stage. A method for estimating the number of atoms and their temperature in the magneto-optical trap is presented. The performance of the compact laser cooling system with the developed Zeeman slower has been experimentally confirmed: ~10 6 171 Yb atoms with a temperature of ~35 μK have been collected in ~1 s. The achieved parameters allow for loading of ~4000 atoms into the optical lattice.
The realization of cold atoms using a compact and low-power-consumption experimental setup is indispensable for cold atom experiments, including optical clocks and quantum simulations. We demonstrate the direct loading of Yb atoms into a 3D magneto-optical trap (MOT) from a dispenser atomic source without using a Zeeman slower. The power consumption of the dispenser was ∼3 W. Spectroscopy of the atomic beam from the dispenser on the 6s2 1S0–6s6p 1P1 Yb transition at 399 nm shows that the flux of the atomic beam reaches 1.4 × 1013 s−1 cm−2. We can load up to 4.1 × 107 atoms into the MOT with slowing and trapping laser powers of 20.3 and 35.0 mW, respectively. The realized cold atom system is reliable and can be adapted for experiments on alkaline earth and other alkaline earth-like atoms.
We describe our experimental apparatus for generating quantum degenerate gases of bosonic 174Yb and fermionic 173Yb atoms. We use a Zeeman slower to generate a slow atomic beam and collect atoms in a magneto-optical trap formed by 556-nm laser beams without frequency modulations. Laser-cooled ytterbium atoms are transferred to a crossed optical dipole trap and evaporatively cooled to quantum degeneracy. Our system generates a Bose-Einstein condensate containing over 6 × 104 174Yb atoms or a degenerate Fermi gas of about 7 × 104 173Yb atoms at T/T F =0.8(1), where T F is the Fermi temperature of the gas. We highlight the high performance of the Zeeman slower and the home-made frequency-doubling systems for 399-nm and 556-nm lasers.