Towards an optical clock for space
Compact, high-performance optical lattice clock based on bosonic atoms
Abstract
Optical clocks operated on satellites are expected to open up new opportunities in time transfer, geodesy, fundamental physics, and satellite navigation. Here we demonstrate an important first step towards this goal: a modular, compact, optical lattice clock (OLC) system that achieves 2.0×10-17 fractional uncertainty. The clock is operated with bosonic strontium and improves the performance of bosonic OLCs by a factor of 30. This has important implications for future use of bosonic OLCs in fundamental physics and metrology. We make use of the clock's metrological performance to measure, with independent clocks, the isotope shift of the S01→P03 transitions of Sr88 and Sr87, with an uncertainty of 12 mHz. The ratio of the transition frequencies is thus determined with 3×10-17 fractional uncertainty.
Details
- External Organisation(s)
-
University Hospital Düsseldorf
University of Birmingham
Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt PTB
- Type
- Article
- Journal
- Physical Review A
- Volume
- 98
- ISSN
- 2469-9926
- Publication date
- 29.11.2018
- Publication status
- Published
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Electronic version(s)
-
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.98.053443 (Access:
Unknown
)
