Kang, Songbai

2015-10-29, Kang, Songbai, Gharavipour, Mohammadreza, Affolderbach, Christoph, Mileti, Gaetano

In today's state of the art compact vapour-cell atomic clocks relying on the pulsed Ramsey-type interrogation, optical detection noise is a major limitation to the achievable short-term stability. In this communication, the influence of the optical detection time on the clock's short-term stability is investigated and a new analytical expression is developed to precisely predict the stability performance, taking into account the details of the optical detection phase of a Ramsey-type atomic clock. The theory is in good agreement with the experimental results. It is applied for evaluating the clock's shot-noise limit.

2015-10-27, Gharavipour, Mohammadreza, Affolderbach, Christoph, Kang, Songbai, Bandi Nagabhushan, Thejesh, Gruet, Florian, Pellaton, Matthieu, Mileti, Gaetano

We report our investigations on a compact high-performance rubidium (Rb) vapour-cell clock based on microwave-optical double-resonance (DR). These studies are done in both DR continuous-wave (CW) and Ramsey schemes using the same Physics Package (PP), with the same Rb vapour cell and a magnetron-type cavity with only 45 cm3 external volume. In the CW-DR scheme, we demonstrate a DR signal with a contrast of 26% and a linewidth of 334 Hz; in Ramsey-DR mode Ramsey signals with higher contrast up to 35% and a linewidth of 160 Hz have been demonstrated. Short-term stabilities of 1.4×10^-13 τ^-1/2 and 2.4×10^-13 τ^-1/2 are measured for CW-DR and Ramsey-DR schemes, respectively. In the Ramsey-DR operation, thanks to the separation of light and microwave interactions in time, the light-shift effect has been suppressed which allows improving the long-term clock stability as compared to CW-DR operation. Implementations in miniature atomic clocks are considered.