Abstract
We describe the Sr optical lattice clock apparatus at NPL with particular emphasis on techniques used to increase reliability and minimise the human requirement in its operation. Central to this is a clock-referenced transfer cavity scheme for the stabilisation of cooling and trapping lasers. We highlight several measures to increase the reliability of the clock with a view towards the realisation of an optical time-scale. The clock contributed 502 hours of data over a 25 day period (84% uptime) in a recent measurement campaign with several uninterrupted periods of more than 48 hours. An instability of 2 x 10-17 was reached after 105 s of averaging in an interleaved self-comparison of the clock.
Highlights
Ultra-precise optical clocks based on lattice-trapped cold atoms [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] offer a new vision of the SI second with accuracy and precision two orders of magnitude beyond the current realisation [6]
Such precision has profound implications for an Earth-based optical clock network which becomes sensitive to fluctuations in gravitational potential at the 1 cm level
We report here a simple scheme to transfer the intrinsic stability of the Sr clock to the cooling and trapping laser systems via a single tunable optical cavity; removing the need for regular frequency measurements of the optical lattice trap by femtosecond optical frequency combs, and ensuring a low frequency deviation of the cooling light without additional stabilisation to an atomic vapor
Summary
Ultra-precise optical clocks based on lattice-trapped cold atoms [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] offer a new vision of the SI second with accuracy and precision two orders of magnitude beyond the current realisation [6]. Such precision has profound implications for an Earth-based optical clock network which becomes sensitive to fluctuations in gravitational potential at the 1 cm level. We give an overview of the experimental setup at NPL and its first operation as an 87Sr optical lattice clock
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