Light-shift comparison of electromagnetically induced transparency and coherent population trapping in continuous-wave and Ramsey spectroscopies

Abstract

In the atomic frequency standard, the light shift inevitably affects the long-term stability of the atomic clock. In this work, we accurately calculated the light shifts of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and coherent population trapping (CPT) clocks operating under continuum and pulse sequence regimes by numerically solving the Liouville density matrix equation, including all the relaxation terms of a three-level system. The results show that the light shifts under pulse excitation are smaller than those under continuous excitation and the light shifts of the CPT process are much smaller than those of the EIT process under both excitations. It is also found that the light shifts in the continuous excitation increase and those in the pulse excitation decrease with an increase in the Rabi frequency. The light shifts will increase with an increase of the relaxations of the ground states for both the processes under both regimes. Compared to all process atomic clocks, the light shift of pulse-excited atomic clocks is the smallest, which will be suitable for many applications.