Portable Laser-Pumped Rb Atomic Clock With Digital Circuits

Reducing the size and complexity of high-performance timekeeping devices is an ever-growing need for various applications, such as 6G wireless technology, positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), Internet of Things (IoT), and ultrafast spectroscopy. This work presents a distributed feedback (DFB) laser-pumped Rb atomic clock, which features extraordinary frequency stability, small size, and low power consumption. The DFB laser head employs a built-in isolator with a linewidth of approximately 1 MHz. For complete optical pumping of the atoms in the absorption cell, the laser beam is expanded to a diameter of 10 mm by using an optical diffuser-based beam expander. The physics package is based on a magnetron microwave cavity and is surrounded by two layers of magnetic shielding. The overall volume of the optical system combined with the physics package is 250 cm3. The proposed atomic clock is also designed to operate at a low temperature, whose absorption cell is maintained at 323 K. Benefiting from the lower Rb atom density, the excited atoms present a long population relaxation time of 5.8 ms. The frequency synthesizer and frequency-locked loop are implemented by digital circuits. The short-term stability of the atomic clock is measured to be $1.8\times 10^{-12}\tau ^{-1/2}$ (1–100 s). Our achievement paves the way for the practical application of the laser-pumped Rb atomic clocks.