Professor Hidetoshi Katori (who also serves as Team Director at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics) and his team, in collaboration with JEOL, have developed a method for continuously supplying and spectroscopically analyzing ultra-low-temperature strontium atomic sources to eliminate dead time in optical lattice clock measurements. Conventionally, dead time occurred because the steps of (1) cooling and preparing the atoms, (2) spectroscopy, and (3) detection were performed sequentially at the same location. However, the team has now demonstrated a new measurement method that enables zero-dead-time operation of optical lattice clocks by continuously transporting atoms and assigning these operations to different locations along a flow path to perform them simultaneously. This is expected to lead to the miniaturization of optical lattice clocks and their application to high-precision sensing, such as the measurement of gravitational fields. The paper reporting these findings was published online in “Nature Communications” on August 6.
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