Demonstration of the Systematic Evaluation of an Optical Lattice Clock Using the Drift-Insensitive Self-Comparison Method

Abstract

The self-comparison method is a powerful tool in the uncertainty evaluation of optical lattice clocks, but any drifts will cause a frequency offset between the two compared clock loops and thus lead to incorrect measurement result. We propose a drift-insensitive self-comparison method to remove this frequency offset by adjusting the clock detection sequence. We also experimentally demonstrate the validity of this method in a one-dimensional 87Sr optical lattice clock. As the clock laser frequency drift exists, the measured frequency difference between two identical clock loops is (240 ± 34) mHz using the traditional self-comparison method, while it is (−15 ± 16) mHz using the drift-insensitive self-comparison method, indicating that this frequency offset is cancelled within current measurement precision. We further use the drift-insensitive self-comparison technique to measure the collisional shift and the second-order Zeeman shift of our clock and the results show that the fractional collisional shift and the second-order Zeeman shift are 4.54(28) × 10−16 and 5.06(3) × 10−17, respectively.

Keywords

• optical lattice clocks
• strontium atoms
• optical lattices
• laser cooling and trapping