Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Cold-collision-shift cancelation and inelastic scattering in a Yb optical lattice clock

Published

Author(s)

Andrew D. Ludlow, Nathan D. Lemke, Jeffrey A. Sherman, Christopher W. Oates, G. Quemener, J. von Stecher, A.M. Rey

Abstract

Recently, ρ-wave cold collisions were shown to dominate the density-dependent shift of the clock transition frequency in a 171Yb optical lattice clock. Here we demonstrate that by operating such a system at the proper excitation fraction, the cold collision shift is canceled below the 5 × 10-18 fractional frequency level. We report inelastic two-body loss rates for 3P0-3P0 and 1S0 -3P scattering. We also measure interaction shifts in an unpolarized atomic sample. Collision measurements for this spin-1/2 171Yb system are relevant for high performance optical clocks as well as strongly-interacting systems for quantum information and quantum simulation applications.
Citation
Physical Review A
Volume
84

Keywords

cold collision, collision shift, inelastic scatter, optical lattice clock, p-wave collision, two-body loss, ytterbium

Citation

Ludlow, A. , Lemke, N. , Sherman, J. , Oates, C. , Quemener, G. , von, J. and Rey, A. (2011), Cold-collision-shift cancelation and inelastic scattering in a Yb optical lattice clock, Physical Review A (Accessed April 25, 2024)
Created November 28, 2011, Updated February 19, 2017