Optical clocks have reached a precision of better than 10-18, which enables them to resolve the relativistic time dilation by only 1cm height difference in the gravitational field of earth. They are useful for searches of physics beyond the standard model, exploration of many-body physics, and societal applications, such as navigation. So far, clocks operate in a pulsed manner, preparing a sample of ultracold atoms and then interrogating that sample. Reaching the ultimate precision needs averaging of 10 thousand samples, taking several hours.

You will join a team building clocks that will overcome this limitation, effectively interrogating the atomic sample continuously. This enables reaching the ultimate precision already after just a few minutes, which is useful for many applications. We want to achieve this by creating clocks that can operate truly continuously, using technology that we have developed to achieve continuous Bose-Einstein condensation [Nature 606, 683 (2022)]. We are building two types of such clocks: a superradiant clock and a zero-deadtime clock. A superradiant clock is a laser that lases on an ultranarrow optical transition. You can read about our plans for this clock in Sheng Zhou’s PhD thesis. For the zero-deadtime clock, we supply atoms from a continuous ultracold Sr source to four clock interrogation zones that are in one vacuum chamber. Clock interrogation can always be executed in at least one zone, while others are reloaded with atoms, enabling continuous operation. With this postdoc position you can contribute to both efforts.