Ultrastable optical clock with neutral atoms in an engineered light shift trap

M. Schioppo, Roger C. Brown, William F. McGrew +10 more

Hidetoshi Katori, Masao Takamoto, V. G. Pal’chikov +1 more

An ultrastable optical clock based on neutral atoms trapped in an optical lattice is proposed. Complete control over the light shift is achieved by employing the 5s(2) 1S0-->5s5p 3P0 transition of 87Sr atoms as a "clock transition." Calculations of ac multipole polarizabilities and dipole hyperpolarizabilities for the clock transition indicate that the contribution of the higher-order light shifts can be reduced to less than 1 mHz, allowing for a projected accuracy of better than 10(-17).

Hidetoshi Katori, Masao Takamoto, Ryoichi Higashi +1 more

Hidetoshi Katori

Employing the engineered electric fields, we demonstrate novel platforms for precision measurements with neutral atoms. (1) Applying the light shift cancellation technique, atoms trapped in an optical lattice reveal 50‐Hz‐narrow optical spectrum, yielding nearly an order of magnitude improvement over existing neutral‐atom‐based clocks. (2) Surface Stark trap has been developed to manipulate scalar atoms that are intrinsically robust to decoherence.

Tanya Zelevinsky, Sebastian Blatt, Martin M. Boyd +3 more

The cover picture shows strontium atoms which are laser cooled to a microkelvin temperature and held in an optical lattice trap. The trap consists of a series of microtraps at the antinodes of the optical standing wave. The intense blue light in the background is the fluorescence of the atoms when they are laser cooled or detected. The clock transition is in red. In their Concept article Zelevinsky et al. (page 375) show that an ultrastable laser recovers a high-resolution spectrum of the narrow, forbidden optical clock transition with a linewidth of 2 Hz. Spectroscopy is performed without recoil shifts, Doppler effects, or ac Stark shifts from the trapping light.

Irène Ventrillard, Audrey Quessada, Richard P. Kovacich +5 more