Systematic evaluation of an atomic clock at 2 × 10−18 total uncertainty

By T. Nicholson, S. Campbell, R. Hutson, G. Marti, Benjamin Bloom, R. McNally, Wei Zhang, M. Barrett, Marianna Safronova, G. Strouse and 2 more. Nature Communications, 2014

723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The pursuit of better atomic clocks has advanced many research areas, providing better quantum state control, new insights in quantum science, tighter limits on fundamental constant variation and improved tests of relativity. The record for the best stability and accuracy is currently held by optical lattice clocks. Here we take an important step towards realizing the full potential of a many-particle clock with a state-of-the-art stable laser. Our 87Sr optical lattice clock now achieves fractional stability of 2.2 × 10−16 at 1 s. With this improved stability, we perform a new accuracy evaluation of our clock, reducing many systematic uncertainties that limited our previous measurements, such as those in the lattice ac Stark shift, the atoms’ thermal environment and the atomic response to room-temperature blackbody radiation. Our combined measurements have reduced the total uncertainty of the JILA Sr clock to 2.1 × 10−18 in fractional frequency units. Atomic clocks are increasingly important for many applications in scientific research and technology. Here, Nicholson et al. present a series of developments allowing them to achieve a new record in atomic clock performance, with a systematic uncertainty of just 2.1 × 10−18 for their 87Sr atomic clock.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da0da8ec21b544f521e3df8feb343eba5dc61aae

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

JILA SrI optical lattice clock with uncertainty of 2.0×10−18 (2019, methodology): “Similarly, the range for β is chosen to encompass the weighted mean of values from published literature [2, 29, 25] to one which is consistent with what is observed in Fig.”
Quantum metrology with nonclassical states of atomic ensembles (2016, background): “It also allows for faster evaluation of systematic errors, which in turn can improve the accuracy (Nicholson et al., 2015).”