An Yb optical clock with a lattice power enhancement cavity

Abstract

We construct a power enhancement cavity to form an optical lattice in an ytterbium optical clock. It is demonstrated that the intra-cavity lattice power can be increased by about 45 times, and the trap depth can be as large as 1400 E r when laser light with a power of only 0.6 W incidents to the lattice cavity. Such high trap depths are the key to accurate evaluation of the lattice-induced light shift with an uncertainty down to ~1×10-18. By probing the ytterbium atoms trapped in the power-enhanced optical lattice, we obtain a 4.3 Hz-linewidth Rabi spectrum, which is then used to feedback to the clock laser for the close loop operation of the optical lattice clock. We evaluate the density shift of the Yb optical lattice clock based on interleaving measurements, which is -0.46(62) mHz. This result is smaller compared to the density shift of our first Yb optical clock without lattice power enhancement cavity mainly due to a larger lattice diameter of 344 μm.