48 -cm-long room-temperature cavities in vertical and horizontal orientations for Sr optical clock.

The development of an optical clock with ultimate accuracy and stability requires lasers with very narrow linewidths. We present two ultrastable laser systems based on 48-cm-long Fabry-Perot cavities made of ultralow expansion glass in horizontal and vertical configurations operating at 698 nm. Fractional frequency instability of the beat signal between the two lasers reaches 1.6×10-15 at the averaging time of 1 s. We experimentally characterized the contribution of the different noise sources (power fluctuations, residual amplitude modulation, the Doppler noise, and sensitivity to the shock impact) and found that in our case the laser frequency instability to a large extent is determined by an optoelectronic feedback loop. Although the vertical configuration was easier to manufacture and transport, it is much more sensitive to acoustics and horizontal accelerations compared to the horizontal one. Both laser systems were transported over a 60 km distance from the Lebedev Physical Institute to the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Physical-Engineering and Radiotechnical Metrology (VNIIFTRI), where they serve as local oscillators for spectroscopy of the clock transition in the recently developed strontium optical clock.

Active fiber-based retroreflector providing phase-retracing anti-parallel laser beams for precision spectroscopy.

We present an active fiber-based retroreflector providing high quality phase-retracing anti-parallel Gaussian laser beams for precision spectroscopy of Doppler sensitive transitions. Our design is well-suited for a number of applications where implementing optical cavities is technically challenging and corner cubes fail to match the demanded requirements, most importantly retracing wavefronts and preservation of the laser polarization. To illustrate the performance of the system, we use it for spectroscopy of the 2S-4P transition in atomic hydrogen and demonstrate an average suppression of the first order Doppler shift to 4 parts in 106 of the full collinear shift. This high degree of cancellation combined with our cryogenic source of hydrogen atoms in the metastable 2S state is sufficient to enable determinations of the Rydberg constant and the proton charge radius with competitive uncertainties. Advantages over the usual Doppler cancellation based on corner cube type retroreflectors are discussed as well as an alternative method using a high finesse cavity.

Inner-shell clock transition in atomic thulium with a small blackbody radiation shift.

One of the key systematic effects limiting the performance of state-of-the-art optical clocks is the blackbody radiation (BBR) shift. Here, we demonstrate unusually low sensitivity of a 1.14 µm inner-shell clock transition in neutral Tm atoms to BBR. By direct polarizability measurements, we infer a differential polarizability of the clock levels of -0.063(30) atomic units corresponding to a fractional frequency BBR shift of only 2.3(1.1) × 10-18 at room temperature. This amount is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of the best optical clocks using neutral atoms (Sr, Yb, Hg) and is competitive with that of ion optical clocks (Al+, Lu+). Our results allow the development of lanthanide-based optical clocks with a relative uncertainty at the 10-17 level.