Development of an operational Yb optical lattice clock towards contribution to the International Atomic Time

We report the status on an Yb optical lattice clock that was designed to run for a long-term operation towards contribution to the International Atomic Time (TAI) regularly. Nearly continuous operation of the Yb clock was realized with 90% uptime over several weeks. This enables to reduce the uncertainty in the link between the Yb clock and TAI to the low 10^-16 level.