Critical open-system dynamics in a one-dimensional optical-lattice clock

Abstract

There have been concerted efforts in recent years to realize the next generation of clocks using alkaline earth atoms in an optical lattice. Assuming that the atoms are independent, such a clock would benefit from a $\sqrt{N}$ enhancement in its stability, associated with the improved signal-to-noise ratio of a large atom number $N$. An interesting question, however, is what type of atomic interactions might affect the clock dynamics, and whether these interactions are deleterious or could even be beneficial. In this work, we investigate the effect of dipole-dipole interactions, in which atoms excited during the clock protocol emit and re-absorb photons. Taking a simple system consisting of a 1D atomic array, we find that dipole-dipole interactions in fact result in an open quantum system exhibiting critical dynamics, as a set of collective excitations acquires a decay rate approaching zero in the thermodynamic limit due to subradiance. A first consequence is that the decay of atomic excited population at long times exhibits a slow power-law behavior, instead of the exponential expected for non-interacting atoms. We also find that excitations among the atoms exhibit fermionic spatial correlations at long times, due to the microscopic properties of the multi-excitation subradiant states. Interestingly, these properties cannot be captured by mean-field dynamics, suggesting the strongly interacting nature of this system. We finally characterize the time-dependent frequency shift in the atomic frequency measurement, and find that it is dominated by the interaction energy of subradiant states at long times. Furthermore, we show that the decay of the clock signal displays at long times a non-exponential behavior, which might be useful to improve the uncertainty limit with which the atomic frequency can be resolved.