Clock-line-mediated Sisyphus Cooling

Published

July 31, 2024

Author(s)

Jacob Siegel, Benjamin Hunt, Tanner Grogan, Youssef Hassan, Kyle Beloy, Roger Brown, Andrew Ludlow, Chun-Chia Chen, Kurt Gibble

Abstract

We demonstrate sub-recoil Sisyphus cooling using the long-lived 3P0 clock state in alkaline-earthlike ytterbium. A 1388 -nm optical standing wave nearly resonant with the 3P0→3D1 transition creates a spatially periodic light shift of the 3P0 clock state. Following excitation on the ultranarrow clock transition, we observe Sisyphus cooling in this potential, as the light shift is correlated with excitation to 3D1 and subsequent spontaneous decay to the 1S0 ground state. We observe that cooling enhances the loading efficiency of atoms into a 759 -nm magic-wavelength 1D optical lattice, as compared to standard Doppler cooling on the 1S0→3P1 transition. Sisyphus cooling yields temperatures below 200nK in the weakly confined, transverse dimensions of the 1D optical lattice. These lower temperatures improve optical lattice clocks by facilitating the use of shallow lattices with reduced light shifts, while retaining large atom numbers to reduce the quantum projection noise. This Sisyphus cooling can be pulsed or continuous, and is applicable to a range of quantum metrology applications.

Citation

Physical Review Letters

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.053401

Local Download

Keywords

laser cooling, optical clock, optical lattice, Sisyphus, alkaline earth

Citation

Siegel, J. , Hunt, B. , Grogan, T. , Hassan, Y. , Beloy, K. , Brown, R. , Ludlow, A. , Chen, C. and Gibble, K. (2024), Clock-line-mediated Sisyphus Cooling, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.053401, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956556 (Accessed January 17, 2025)