Progress of a compact microwave clock based on atoms cooled with a diffractive optic

摘要

An atomic clock based on a compact source of cold atoms and coherent population trapping (CPT) is anencouraging goal for future low-volume atomic frequency references. Our experiment seeks to investigate theperformance of such a system by applying CPT in a high-contrast lin?lin polarisation scheme to our 87Rbgrating magneto optical trap (GMOT) apparatus. In this paper, we report on our progress of improving short-term stability of our cold-atom CPT apparatus. Our recent measurements have shown a short-term stability of5 ×10~（-11）/τ~（1/2） , with the ability to average down for timeτ > 100 s.