Active optical clock

Abstract

This article presents the principles and techniques of active optical clock, a special laser combining the laser physics of one-atom laser, bad-cavity gas laser, super-cavity stabilized laser and optical atomic clock together. As a simple example, an active optical clock based on thermal strontium atomic beam shows a quantum-limited linewidth of 0.51 Hz, which is insensitive to laser cavity-length noise, and may surpass the recorded narrowest 6.7 Hz of Hg ion optical clock and 1.5 Hz of very recent optical lattice clock. The estimated 0.1 Hz one-second instability and 0.27 Hz uncertainty are limited only by the relativistic Doppler effect, and can be improved by cold atoms.