Conveners
Compact Clocks
- Erling Riis (University of Strathclyde)
Research on room-temperature trapped ion atomic clocks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently culminated in the launch of NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC) mission in 2019. Operating in space for 2 years, DSAC achieved a new level of performance among the most stable space clocks now in use and is expected to enable new space clock applications that require both high stability and...
As communication and navigation systems increasingly rely on precise timing signals from atomic clocks, the interest in smaller and more power-efficient clocks has grown in recent years. However, achieving high performance in clock frequency stabilities while reducing size, weight, and power (SWaP) has proven to be a challenge. Surveying existing atomic clocks in use clearly shows a stubborn...
We have developed several sub-10 mL vacuum-gap Fabry-Perot cavities that provide ~$10^{-14}$ factional frequency stability and ultralow phase noise, using scalable lithographic techniques to fabricate million-finesse mirrors.
We present an overview of the latest activities relating to optical lattice clocks at NPL inlcuding: contributions to the BIPM for steering TAI, a full systematic evaluation of NPL-Sr1 with a target uncertainty below 5e-18, composite clock schemes making use of quantum non-demolition readout to improve the precision of clock comparisons, and the outlook for a new Yb optical lattice clock with...
