Broadband Rydberg Electrometry with a Strontium Lattice Clock

Atomic systems are both extremely precise due to their inherent lack of drift, and accurate due to their limited, known, and controllable external interactions. To extend atomic sensors to electrometry, we can employ Rydberg states which have high electric field sensitivities over a large bandwidth from DC to THz. Current Rydberg atomic electrometers are often based on warm vapor cells, which are limited due to Doppler effects rather than the fundamental limits of the atomic system. We present both theoretical and experimental progress towards an ultra-cold strontium clock electrometer which combines an optical lattice clock with the high electric field sensitivity and bandwidth of Rydberg atoms. The frequency of the clock transition is made susceptible to external electric fields through off-resonant Rydberg dressing of the excited state of the clock transition. Shifts in the clock frequency are determined using standard lattice clock interferometry techniques. This design also permits leveraging the Rydberg atoms for strong interactions as well as electric field sensitivity, paving the way for entanglement-enhanced electric-field metrology.