Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

 

Understanding Atomic Interactions in an Optical Lattice Clock and Using Them to Study Many-Body Physics Public Deposited

https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/m326m174z
Abstract
  • Strontium optical lattice clocks at JILA recently demonstrated record-high accuracy and stability. These advances were enabled by an ultrastable laser with fractional frequency stability of 1x10-16 at 1 second. This laser allows us to study systematic shifts of the 1S0 to 3P0 clock transition with unprecedented precision. Density-dependent frequency shifts represent an unavoidable perturbation for clocks based on many atoms. Our studies of atomic interactions in an optical lattice clock system uncover the nature of these interactions and reveal important many-body atomic correlation effects in this open quantum system. By extending our measurements to all ten nuclear-spin sublevels of the clock states, we observe the first direct evidence of SU(N) symmetric interactions in alkaline earth(-like) atoms. Using the techniques we developed in these studies, we also demonstrate a novel technique for measuring the frequency noise spectrum of an ultrastable laser. We discuss designs for the future direction of our experiment which will place 87Sr atoms within a high finesse cavity that is resonant on the 1S0 to 3P1 transition. We will use this system to study collective effects in cavity quantum electrodynamics. Most notably, strong atom-cavity coupling can enhance the spectroscopic sensitivity of our clock by creating spin-squeezed states via quantum non-demolition measurements. As a precursor to future work studying cavity-mediated collective behavior, we use the unique atomic structure of 88Sr to investigate free-space retarded dipolar coupling in an optically thick sample of atoms.

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  • 2014
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  • 2020-01-21
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