Efficient atomic clocks operated with several atomic ensembles

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel atomic clock scheme that locks a local oscillator to multiple atomic ensembles, achieving exponential stability improvements over traditional single-ensemble methods.

Contribution

The authors introduce a method of locking the LO to several ensembles, resulting in exponential stability scaling, a significant advancement over conventional atomic clock techniques.

Findings

Exponential improvement in clock stability with multiple ensembles

Stability scales as $(eta N)^{-m/2}$, where $N$ is atoms per ensemble and $m$ is the number of ensembles

Protocol-dependent constant $eta$ influences stability enhancement

Abstract

Atomic clocks are typically operated by locking a local oscillator (LO) to a single atomic ensemble. In this article we propose a scheme where the LO is locked to several atomic ensembles instead of one. This results in an exponential improvement compared to the conventional method and provides a stability of the clock scaling as $(\alpha N)^{-m/2}$ with $N$ being the number of atoms in each of the $m$ ensembles and $\alpha$ is a constant depending on the protocol being used to lock the LO