An optical lattice clock with accuracy and stability at the 10−18 level

By B. Bloom, T. Nicholson, Jason Williams, S. Campbell, M. Bishof, Xiaogang Zhang, Wei Zhang, S. Bromley, Jun Ye, Jun Ye. Nature, 2013

952 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Progress in atomic, optical and quantum science has led to rapid improvements in atomic clocks. At the same time, atomic clock research has helped to advance the frontiers of science, affecting both fundamental and applied research. The ability to control quantum states of individual atoms and photons is central to quantum information science and precision measurement, and optical clocks based on single ions have achieved the lowest systematic uncertainty of any frequency standard. Although many-atom lattice clocks have shown advantages in measurement precision over trapped-ion clocks, their accuracy has remained 16 times worse. Here we demonstrate a many-atom system that achieves an accuracy of 6.4 × 10−18, which is not only better than a single-ion-based clock, but also reduces the required measurement time by two orders of magnitude. By systematically evaluating all known sources of uncertainty, including in situ monitoring of the blackbody radiation environment, we improve the accuracy of optical lattice clocks by a factor of 22. This single clock has simultaneously achieved the best known performance in the key characteristics necessary for consideration as a primary standard—stability and accuracy. More stable and accurate atomic clocks will benefit a wide range of fields, such as the realization and distribution of SI units, the search for time variation of fundamental constants, clock-based geodesy and other precision tests of the fundamental laws of nature. This work also connects to the development of quantum sensors and many-body quantum state engineering (such as spin squeezing) to advance measurement precision beyond the standard quantum limit.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c679796f7519ebb5b877bc224520e34307f558d4

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistics and Probability

Hidetoshi Katori

Citations in the corpus

Geopotential measurements with synchronously linked optical lattice clocks (2016, background): “tical lattice consists of two π-polarised counter-propagating laser beams, as described in ref. 4. The lattice frequencies of RIKEN and UT clocks are stabilised to 368,554,490.0(5) MHz and 368,554,490(3) MHz, respectively. The axial trap frequencies of atoms in the one-dimensional (1D) lattice are s”
Gravitational wave detection with optical lattice atomic clocks (2016, methodology): “In contrast, our clock-based scheme requires drag-free satellite technology, but this enables the loading of atoms at microKelvin temperatures into the ground state of the optical lattice [11].”
Quantum metrology with nonclassical states of atomic ensembles (2016, background): “Currently, the stability of atomic clocks is nearly (Bloom et al., 2014; Hinkley et al., 2013; Nicholson et al., 2012) or already—as in the case of ion spectroscopy (Itano et al., 1993) and fountain clocks (Santarelli et al., 1999)—limited by Eq.”
Towards a Re-definition of the Second Based on Optical Atomic Clocks (2015, background): “ty of this clock was estimated to be 3 1710 [31]. Even lower estimated standard uncertainties at the 10 18 level have been derived for a clock based on Sr atoms kept in a room temperature environment [29] or in a cryogenic housing [28]. A considerable number of frequency measurements of the 87Sr opt”
A strontium lattice clock with 3 × 10 − 17 ?> inaccuracy and its frequency (2013, background): “However, a recent study placed strontium lattice clocks into the accuracy regime of the best ion clocks [22].”