Congratulations to Xin and Jack on the publication of their paper “Reducing the instability of an optical lattice clock using multiple atomic ensembles” in Physical Review X! You can read the entire published paper at this link (with no paywall or special access required): https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.011006
Standard atomic clocks treat all the atoms in the clock the same, measuring them all identically and at once. In this paper we show that by instead splitting the atoms up into multiple clouds of atoms that are spatially resolved and independently controllable, we can more precisely measure the frequency difference between the atomic transition and the clock laser. We demonstrate new techniques that make use of either two or four separate clouds of atoms to improve the precision of the clock by up to a factor of 2 compared to an otherwise identical standard optical atomic clock with the same total number of atoms.
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