Towards an Active Optical Clock using an Optical Conveyor within a Ring Cavity

We report on our progress towards a continuously-operating active optical clock on the
³
P
0
→
¹
S
0
transition of neutral
⁸⁷
Sr or
⁸⁸
Sr atoms. Our approach is based on a ring-cavity in which an optical conveyor carries a continuous stream of atoms along the cavity mode. We estimate the performance of our system by simulating the superradiant output from two counter-propagating cavity modes interacting with the atoms. The impact of the position-dependent light shifts, collisional decoherence and loss of atoms trapped within the optical conveyor are analysed.