Dispersion detection of optical clock transition in thermal atomic beam

Abstract

In order to develop small optical clock for various transportable applications with better stability and accuracy than that of commercial small Cs clock and H-maser clock, our group has proposed a small Ca atomic beam clock scheme with electron-shelving detection. Its potential stability was experimentally demonstrated recently. Here, we first demonstrated the dispersive detection of 657 nm transition via the Faraday rotation effect of 423 nm transition based on a thermal Ca atomic beam, this alternative detection method can effectively detect the clock signal by the ground state atoms after the clock laser interrogation. The Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter of 423 nm transition can reach a maximum transmission of 10%. With a magnetic field of 84 G, the observed 3.3% of the ground state atoms has been excited to the σ± level of metastable 3P1(m=±1) state, which are separated 176.6 MHz to m=0 level.