Compact Microcontroller-Based Control System for Transportable Lattice Optical Clocks

In this paper, we present description and characteristics of a compact control system for the transportable optical lattice clocks. The hardware of this system is based on the STM32 microcontroller and the software with a graphical interface implemented by the Python software language. The control system has more than twenty digital outputs, ten analog outputs and the ability to connect the additional modules. This system provides the generation of the digital signals with a time resolution of 10 μs with a high synchronization accuracy when the digital-to-analog converter operates simultaneously with digital signals. We compared our custom the microcontroller-based system with the commercial Real-Time National Instruments system, which is often used in experiments with ultracold atoms. Experiments have shown that using both systems allows to cool 87Sr atoms to a temperature of ∼14 μK. This is enough to load the atoms into an optical lattice and to perform the clock transition spectroscopy.