A multi-band atomic candle with microwave-dressed Rydberg atoms

Abstract

Stabilizing important physical quantities to atom-based standards lies at the heart of modern atomic, molecular and optical physics, and is widely applied to the field of precision metrology. Of particular importance is the atom-based microwave field amplitude stabilizer, the so-called atomic candle. Previous atomic candles are realized with atoms in their ground state, and hence suffer from the lack of frequency band tunability and small stabilization bandwidth, severely limiting their development and potential applications. To tackle these limitations, we employ microwave-dressed Rydberg atoms to realize a novel atomic candle that features multi-band frequency tunability and large stabilization bandwidth. We demonstrate amplitude stabilization of microwave field from C-band to Ka-band, which could be extended to quasi-DC and terahertz fields by exploring abundant Rydberg levels. Our atomic candle achieves stabilization bandwidth of 100 Hz, outperforming previous ones by more than two orders of magnitude. Our simulation indicates the stabilization bandwidth can be further increased up to 100 kHz. Our work paves a route to develop novel electric field control and applications with a noise-resilient, miniaturized, sensitive and broadband atomic candle.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Rydberg atoms / microwave / atomic spectroscopy

References

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Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary materials are available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1218-6 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-022-1218-6.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2021YFA1402003, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12004127, 12004126, 12104173 and 12005067). W. L. acknowledges support from the EPSRC through Grant No. EP/R04340X/1 via the QuantERA project “ERyQSenS”, the UKIERI-UGC Thematic Partnership (IND/CONT/G/16-17/73), and the Royal Society through the International Exchanges Cost Share award No. IEC\NSFC\181078. Y. Z. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12088101), and NSAF (Grant No. U1930403).

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