A Novel Laser Activated Atom Source for Portable Strontium Optical Lattice Atomic Clocks

Atomic clocks have been in common use since the 1950s and over this period the clock community has had two main goals: increasing the performance of the clocks and increasing their portability. At Birmingham we aim to compress a strontium optical lattice clock, a clock with an extremely high accuracy, into a portable package. Many novel approaches need to be employed to allow such a clock to operate with a favorable SWaP while maintaining the low instability and uncertainty that makes optical clocks a desirable frequency standard. The focus of this work is to use laser activation of a strontium compound as the atomic source for the clock. Previously work published by this group [1] demonstrated that it is possible to release the strontium atoms from strontium oxide successfully load a magneto-optical trap (MOT).