Optical Atomic Clock, Frequency Comb, Free-Space Optical Time Transfer, Photonic Integrated Circuit
Abstract:
Vector Atomic has recently developed and fielded multiple optical clocks utilizing molecular iodine. Iodine exhibits modest systematics, including light shifts, magnetic field shifts, temperature-driven collisional shift, and helium collisions, all of which make it an attractive clock candidate for field applications. A high performance version of this clock has been integrated into a 30 L, 3U 19-inch rackmount chassis and exhibits 2.5E-14/root(tau) instability while maintaining an instability of 2E-15 after one day of averaging. An ultracompact iodine clock is also under development, which displays an instability in the low 1E-13/root(tau) range while maintaining a frequency instability below 1E-14 at 1E5 seconds. Data underlying multiple demonstrations of these systems will be presented as well as a discussion of the various subsystems, including the spectrometer, laser system, and frequency comb.
