Stability of a trapped atom clock on a chip

Abstract

We present a compact atomic clock interrogating ultracold 87Rb magnetically trapped on an atom chip. Very long coherence times sustained by spin self-rephasing allow us to interrogate the atomic transition with 85% contrast at 5 s Ramsey time. The clock exhibits a fractional frequency stability of $5.8\times 10^{-13}$ at 1 s and is likely to integrate into the $1\times 10^{-15}$ range in less than a day. A detailed analysis of 7 noise sources explains the measured frequency stability. Fluctuations in the atom temperature (0.4 nK shot-to-shot) and in the offset magnetic field ($5\times 10^{-6}$ relative fluctuations shot-to-shot) are the main noise sources together with the local oscillator, which is degraded by the 30% duty cycle. The analysis suggests technical improvements to be implemented in a future second generation set-up. The results demonstrate the remarkable degree of technical control that can be reached in an atom chip experiment.

12 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Atom Interferometers
• Non-equilibrium coherence dynamics in one-dimensional Bose gases
• Progress in Atomic Fountains at LNE-SYRTE
• Strong saturation absorption imaging of dense clouds of ultracold atoms
• Spatially Resolved Excitation of Rydberg Atoms and Surface Effects on an Atom Chip
• Microwave potentials and optimal control for robust quantum gates on an atom chip
• A transportable strontium optical lattice clock
• Improved detection of small atom numbers through image processing
• Imaging of microwave fields using ultracold atoms
• Measuring Energy Differences by BEC Interferometry on a Chip
• Heterodyne non-demolition measurements on cold atomic samples: towards the preparation of non-classical states for atom interferometry
• Spin waves and Collisional Frequency Shifts of a Trapped-Atom Clock
• Alkali vapor pressure modulation on the 100ms scale in a single-cell vacuum system for cold atom experiments

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Compact chip-scale guided cold atom gyrometers for inertial navigation: Enabling technologies and design study
• Heisenberg-limited Sagnac Interferometer with Multi-particle States
• Non-adiabatic quantum state preparation and quantum state transport in chains of Rydberg atoms
• Optically guided atom interferometer tuned to magic wavelength