A Fermi-degenerate three-dimensional optical lattice clock

S L Campbell; R B Hutson; G E Marti; A Goban; N Darkwah Oppong; R L McNally; L Sonderhouse; J M Robinson; W Zhang; B J Bloom; J Ye

doi:10.1126/science.aam5538

A Fermi-degenerate three-dimensional optical lattice clock

Science. 2017 Oct 6;358(6359):90-94. doi: 10.1126/science.aam5538.

Authors

S L Campbell^{1

2}, R B Hutson^{1

2}, G E Marti¹, A Goban¹, N Darkwah Oppong¹, R L McNally^{1

2}, L Sonderhouse^{1

2}, J M Robinson^{1

2}, W Zhang¹, B J Bloom^{1

2}, J Ye^{3

2}

Affiliations

¹ JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, 440 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
² Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, 390 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
³ JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, 440 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. ye@jila.colorado.edu.

PMID: 28983047
DOI: 10.1126/science.aam5538

Abstract

Strontium optical lattice clocks have the potential to simultaneously interrogate millions of atoms with a high spectroscopic quality factor of 4 × 10¹⁷ Previously, atomic interactions have forced a compromise between clock stability, which benefits from a large number of atoms, and accuracy, which suffers from density-dependent frequency shifts. Here we demonstrate a scalable solution that takes advantage of the high, correlated density of a degenerate Fermi gas in a three-dimensional (3D) optical lattice to guard against on-site interaction shifts. We show that contact interactions are resolved so that their contribution to clock shifts is orders of magnitude lower than in previous experiments. A synchronous clock comparison between two regions of the 3D lattice yields a measurement precision of 5 × 10^-19 in 1 hour of averaging time.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't