Ramsey Spectroscopy with Displaced Frequency Jumps

Published

March 19, 2019

Author(s)

Moshe Shuker, Juniper Wren Y. Pollock, Rodolphe Boudot, V. I. Yudin, A. V. Taichenachev, John E. Kitching, Elizabeth A. Donley

Abstract

Sophisticated Ramsey-based interrogation protocols using composite laser pulse sequences have been recently proposed to provide in next-generation high-precision atomic clocks a near perfect elimination of frequency shifts induced during the atom-probing field interaction. We propose here a simple alternative approach for implementation of the auto-balanced Ramsey (ABR) interrogation protocol and demonstrate its application to a microwave cold-atom clock based on coherent population trapping. The main originality of the method, based on two consecutive Ramsey sequences with different dark periods, is to sample the central Ramsey fringes with frequency-jumps finely-adjusted by an additional frequency-displacement concomitant parameter, scaling as the inverse of the dark period. The advantage of the present displaced frequency- jumps Ramsey (DFJR) spectroscopy is that the local oscillator frequency is used as a single physical variable to control both servo loops of the ABR sequence, simplifying its implementation. Compared to the usual Ramsey-CPT technique, the DFJR scheme reduces the sensitivity of the clock frequency to variations of the CPT sideband ratio and to the one- photon laser detuning by more than an order of magnitude. This simple method could be applied in a wide variety of Ramsey-spectroscopy based applications including frequency metrology with CPT-based and optical atomic clocks, mass spectrometry and precision spectroscopy.

Citation

Physical Review Letters

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

atomic clock, laser cooling, light-shifts, Ramsey spectroscopy

Citation

Shuker, M. , Y., J. , Boudot, R. , Yudin, V. , Taichenachev, A. , Kitching, J. and Donley, E. (2019), Ramsey Spectroscopy with Displaced Frequency Jumps, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=927136 (Accessed January 21, 2025)