Group Seminar via Zoom: Continuous loading of atoms into a high finesse cavity in the lamb dicke regime

Dealing with the unique situation of partial lock downs worldwide and home office solutions at our Institute due to the current spreading of the Covid 19 virus, we are now holding our group seminars and journal clubs via video conference.
This procedure enables us to continue our research, enhance discussions and exchange important information.

Abstract:

Superradiant lasers are a promising path towards realizing a narrow-linewidth, high-precision and high-bandwidth active frequency reference [1]. They shift the phase memory from the optical cavity, which is subject to technical and thermal vibration noise, to ultra-narrow optical atomic transitions of cold atoms trapped inside thecavity. Our previous demonstration of pulsed superradiance on the mHz transition in 87Sr [2,3] achieved a fractional Allan deviation of 6.7x10-16 at 1s of averaging. Moving towards continuous-wave superradiance shows promise to improve the short-term frequency stability by potentially orders of magnitude. A key challenge in realizing a cw superradiant laser is the continuous supply of cold atoms that act as the laser's gain and phase memory. I will present continuous loading of cold 88Sr atoms into a ring cavity in the strong collective atom-cavity coupling regime and deterministic transport of atoms within the cavity using a travelling wave optical lattice. Our approach is to guide atoms through a series of spatially separated laser cooling and deceleration stages before using a 3D molasses to capture them into a magic-wavelength conveyor belt-style moving optical lattice supported by the ring cavity. Our continuous, high flux apparatus is an excellent starting point for a continuous wave superradiant laser, dead-time free atom interferometer [4], and high-precision atomic clock [5].

[1] D. Meiser, J. Ye, D. R. Carlson, M. J. Holland, Prospects for a millihertz-linewidth laser. Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 163601 (2009).

[2] M. A. Norcia, M. N. Winchester, J. R. K. Cline, J. K. Thompson "Superradiance on the millihertz linewidth strontium clock transition." Science Advances 2, e1601231 (2016)

[3] M. A. Norcia, J. R. K. Cline, J. A. Muniz, J. M. Robinson, R. B. Hutson, A. Goban, G. E. Marti, J. Ye, J. K. Thompson, "Frequency Measurements of Superradiance from the Strontium Clock Transition" PRX 8, 021036 (2018)

[4] I. Dutta, D. Savoie, B. Fang, et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 183003 (2016).

[5] M. Schioppo, R. Brown, W. McGrew, et al. Nature Photon 11, 48–52 (2017).

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