Strontium Clock Video Transcript

I'm Jun Ye, and I'm a fellow of JILA and a fellow of NIST.

My research is really to probe the frontier of light/matter interactions, with light being very precisely controlled and the matter being also very precisely controlled in single quantum state. And really understand the fundamental properties of light/matter interactions and the novel applications of their interactions. I think our work reflects very well the core mission of NIST, which is to understand, develop fundamental understanding of nature, and it was a goal to improve and advance the art of measurement science. JILA allows a powerful combination of focused research effort, enabled by support from NIST, and innovative free minds enabled by the dynamic environment of CU. The optical clock is a good example. You know, in order to develop a clock, what you want is to understand again, the field, which can be light or microwave field, its interaction with matter. And so what we can do now is to maintain a very high, phase-stable optical field and also prepare matter in a single quantum state and then bring the light and the matter together and let them interact. And we can understand their interaction extremely well by preserving the quantum coherence between light and matter over a long period of time. And also enhance their interaction by having many, many atoms participating and identical particles participating in this process of light/matter interactions. And that all comes based on the technology Nobel laureate Jan Hall built over many years of very stable, ultra stable lasers. They can really be able to count individual optical cycles and maintain long-term phase coherence, let them interact with atoms and finally have frequency combs to read them out. In doing so, these four steps, very precise control of light, very good control of matter, preparing them in single quantum state, enhance their interactions, and then preserving the quantum coherence between them, we can build the world's best clock in the future. In my mind, NIST is really a haven, I should actually say, heaven for precision measurement. And in my mind, I think in many people's minds, precision measurement is a foundation of modern science and technology.