No Arabic abstract
We developed an all-optical link system for making remote comparisons of two distant ultra-stable optical clocks. An optical carrier transfer system based on a fiber interferometer was employed to compensate the phase noise accumulated during the propagation through a fiber link. Transfer stabilities of $2times10^{-15}$ at 1 second and $4times10^{-18}$ at 1000 seconds were achieved in a 90-km link. An active polarization control system was additionally introduced to maintain the transmitted light in an adequate polarization, and consequently, a stable and reliable comparison was accomplished. The instabilities of the all-optical link system, including those of the erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) which are free from phase-noise compensation, were below $2times10^{-15}$ at 1 second and $7times10^{-17}$ at 1000 seconds. The system was available for the direct comparison of two distant $^{87}$Sr lattice clocks via an urban fiber link of 60 km. This technique will be essential for the measuring the reproducibility of optical frequency standards.
We report a cascaded optical link of 1100 km for ultra-stable frequency distribution over an Internet fiber network. The link is composed of four spans for which the propagation noise is actively compensated. The robustness and the performance of the link are ensured by five fully automated optoelectronic stations, two of them at the link ends, and three deployed on the field and connecting the spans. This device coherently regenerates the optical signal with the heterodyne optical phase locking of a low-noise laser diode. Optical detection of the beat-note signals for the laser lock and the link noise compensation are obtained with stable and low-noise fibered optical interferometer. We show 3.5 days of continuous operation of the noise-compensated 4-span cascaded link leading to fractional frequency instability of 4x10-16 at 1-s measurement time and 1x10-19 at 2000 s. This cascaded link was extended to 1480-km with the same performance. This work is a significant step towards a sustainable wide area ultra-stable optical frequency distribution and comparison network at a very high level of performance.
Fiber-based remote comparison of $^{87}$Sr lattice clocks in 24 km distant laboratories is demonstrated. The instability of the comparison reaches $5times10^{-16}$ over an averaging time of 1000 s, which is two orders of magnitude shorter than that of conventional satellite links and is limited by the instabilities of the optical clocks. By correcting the systematic shifts that are predominated by the differential gravitational redshift, the residual fractional difference is found to be $(1.0pm7.3)times10^{-16}$, confirming the coincidence between the two clocks. The accurate and speedy comparison of distant optical clocks paves the way for a future optical redefinition of the second.
A sharp resonance line that appears in three-photon transitions between the $^{1}S_{0}$ and $^{3}P_{0}$ states of alkaline earth and Yb atoms is proposed as an optical frequency standard. This proposal permits the use of the even isotopes, in which the clock transition is narrower than in proposed clocks using the odd isotopes and the energy interval is not affected by external magnetic fields or the polarization of trapping light. The method has the unique feature that the width and rate of the clock transition can be continuously adjusted from the $MHz$ level to sub-$mHz$ without loss of signal amplitude by varying the intensities of the three optical beams. Doppler and recoil effects can be eliminated by proper alignment of the three optical beams or by point confinement in a lattice trap. The three beams can be mixed to produce the optical frequency corresponding to the $^{3}P_{0}$ - $^{1}S_{0}$ clock interval.
We report on transferring 1E-16-level fractional frequency stability of a master laser operated at 1.5 {mu}m to a slave laser operated at 698 nm, using a femtosecond fiber comb as transfer oscillator. With the 698 nm laser, the 1S_0 - 3P_0 clock transition of 87Sr was resolved to a Fourier-limited line width of 1.5 Hz (before: 10 Hz). Potential noise sources contributed by the frequency comb are discussed in detail.
Recent realisation of three-dimensional optical lattice clocks circumvents short range collisional clock shifts which have been the bottle neck towards higher precision; the long range electronic dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms becomes the primary source of clock shift due to interatomic interactions. We study the Rabi spectroscopy of three-dimensional optical lattice clocks with unity filling. From the Lindblad equation governing the time evolution of the density matrix of the atoms, we derive the Bloch equations in the presence of the external Rabi driving laser field, and solve the equations approximately to the first order of the coupling strength of the dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms. We find that the clock shift equals to the product of the coupling strength, a factor determined by the parameters of the Rabi pulse, and another factor depending on the configuration of the three-dimensional optical lattice. Our result on the clock shift within the Rabi spectroscopy can be checked by measurement in future experiment.