p-Wave cold collisions in an optical lattice clock

TL;DR

This paper investigates p-wave collisions in ultracold fermionic ytterbium within an optical lattice clock, revealing how strong interactions can suppress collision-induced energy shifts, thus improving clock accuracy and benefiting quantum technologies.

Contribution

It provides the first precise measurement of p-wave collision effects in fermionic ytterbium and demonstrates collision shift suppression at high densities in a 2D lattice.

Findings

Identification of p-wave collisions in fermionic ytterbium

Demonstration of collision shift suppression at high density

Potential improvements in optical lattice clock accuracy

Abstract

We study ultracold collisions in fermionic ytterbium by precisely measuring the energy shifts they impart on the atom's internal clock states. Exploiting Fermi statistics, we uncover p-wave collisions, in both weakly and strongly interacting regimes. With the higher density afforded by two-dimensional lattice confinement, we demonstrate that strong interactions can lead to a novel suppression of this collision shift. In addition to reducing the systematic errors of lattice clocks, this work has application to quantum information and quantum simulation with alkaline-earth atoms.