DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS DISSERTATION DEFENSE: Guglielmo Panelli

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Title:   

Doppler-free multiphoton excitation of optical clock transitions and a platform for spin-squeezed atomic sources

Abstract:  

The heart of precision measurement using atoms is laser spectroscopy of atomic transitions. Improvements and innovations in spectroscopy enable advances in atomic clocks, quantum information science, and fundamental tests of physics, many of which rely on the coherent manipulation of ultra-narrow optical clock transitions, whose exceptionally long coherence times provide unrivaled frequency stability and sensitivity. In this talk, I present four methods for manipulating optical clock transitions through Doppler-free multiphoton excitation with accompanying demonstrations on free-space, thermal ensembles of strontium-88 atoms. With this class of Doppler-free techniques, we achieve sub-microsecond coherent excitation of the ultra-narrow 1S0-3P0 clock transition, spectroscopic linewidths at the 100 Hz scale in ensembles with 100 kHz of Doppler broadening, and a 1000-fold suppression of Doppler dephasing in a Ramsey sensor. The techniques shown are applicable to narrow-line transitions in many atomic species and show promise for a wide variety of quantum devices. I close by discussing our platform for generating highly spin-squeezed sources of large atomic ensembles using optical-cavity-based quantum non-demolition measurement in tandem with Doppler-free excitation.