Cold-collision-shift cancellation and inelastic scattering in a Yb optical lattice clock

摘要

Recently, p-wave cold collisions were shown to dominate the density-dependentshift of the clock transition frequency in a 171Yb optical lattice clock. Herewe demonstrate that by operating such a system at the proper excitationfraction, the cold collision shift is canceled below the 5x10^{-18} fractionalfrequency level. We report inelastic two-body loss rates for 3P0-3P0 and1S0-3P0 scattering. We also measure interaction shifts in an unpolarized atomicsample. Collision measurements for this spin-1/2 171Yb system are relevant forhigh performance optical clocks as well as strongly-interacting systems forquantum information and quantum simulation applications.