An Atomic-Array Optical Clock with Single-Atom Readout

By I. Madjarov, Alexandre Cooper, Adam L. Shaw, J. Covey, V. Schkolnik, T. Yoon, Jason R. Williams, M. Endres. Physical Review X, 2019

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Currently, the most accurate and stable clocks use optical interrogation of either a single ion or an ensemble of neutral atoms confined in an optical lattice. Here, we demonstrate a new optical clock system based on an array of individually trapped neutral atoms with single-atom readout, merging many of the benefits of ion and lattice clocks as well as creating a bridge to recently developed techniques in quantum simulation and computing with neutral atoms. We evaluate single-site resolved frequency shifts and short-term stability via self-comparison. Atom-by-atom feedback control enables direct experimental estimation of laser noise contributions. Results agree well with an ab initio Monte Carlo simulation that incorporates finite temperature, projective read-out, laser noise, and feedback dynamics. Our approach, based on a tweezer array, also suppresses interaction shifts while retaining a short dead time, all in a comparatively simple experimental setup suited for transportable operation. These results establish the foundations for a third optical clock platform and provide a novel starting point for entanglement-enhanced metrology, quantum clock networks, and applications in quantum computing and communication with individual neutral atoms that require optical clock state control.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4384e40b5285058a5a6245a5b7686cb4023ef7f9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Alec Jenkins
2. Felix Rönchen
3. Aruku Senoo
4. Joanna W. Lis
5. W. McGrew
6. A. Kaufman

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Alec Jenkins
2. Aruku Senoo
3. Joanna W. Lis
4. W. McGrew
5. Felix Rönchen
6. A. Kaufman

Citations in the corpus

• Midcircuit Operations Using the omg Architecture in Neutral Atom Arrays (2023, methodology): “By shelving optical qubit coherence in the nuclear qubit via the tools demonstrated here, these protocols become realizable in an atom array optical clock [65, 88, 89].”
• Ytterbium Nuclear-Spin Qubits in an Optical Tweezer Array (2021, background): “In the case of alkaline-earth atoms, marrying tweezer-based control with the long-lived optical transitions characteristic of this atomic group has enabled exploration of tweezer clocks [30, 33, 34].”