Spectrally tailored clock laser for quantum state engineering and many-body physics in a 3D optical lattice clock*

The JILA quantum gas 3D optical lattice clock provides a rich playground for studying quantum many-body physics enabled by the capability to spectroscopically resolve subtle atomic interactions and precisely control quantum states. The heart of our atomic clock experiment is an ultra-stable clock laser, which has a noise profile synthesized from the high-frequency stability of a ULE optical reference cavity and the low-frequency stability of a cryogenic Si cavity. We present our method for spectrally tailoring the clock laser to perform high-fidelity optical single-qubit rotations of ⁸⁷Sr [1] that will allow us to probe and engineer many-body interactions such as superexchange [2] and radiative dipolar interactions [3] in our 3D lattice system. These interactions are of fundamental and practical interest, as they not only deepen our understanding of quantum many-body physics but also hold promise for enhancing clock performance through generating large-scale entanglement.

References

[1] Yan, L. et al. A High-Power Clock Laser Spectrally Tailored for High-Fidelity Quantum State Engineering. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.09343 (2025).

[2] Milner, W. R. et al. Coherent evolution of superexchange interaction in seconds long optical clock spectroscopy. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13398 (2024).

[3] Hutson, R. B., Milner, W. R., Yan, L., Ye, J. & Sanner, C. Observation of millihertz-level cooperative Lamb shifts in an optical atomic clock. Science 383, 384–387 (2024).