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Dual-Faraday-laser-pumped cesium beam clock with $7.7\times 10^{-13}/\sqrtτ$ frequency stability

Atomic Physics 2026-08-06 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Compact cesium beam clocks are major frequency references for deployable timing systems. However, further improvement of their short-term frequency stability is limited by the clock signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Although two-laser optical pumping can increase the effective atomic utilization, the achievable clock SNR has long been limited by laser-induced frequency-to-amplitude noise conversion. Here, we demonstrate a compact dual-Faraday-laser-pumped (DFP) Cs beam clock enabled by a low-frequency-noise atom-referenced laser architecture. The intracavity Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter provides inherent alignment to the Cs D2_2 resonances, while modulation transfer spectroscopy offers suppressed frequency noise and drift. The resulting laser system supports robust turnkey operation with a Lorentzian linewidth of 2.12 kHz. The DFP Cs clock achieves a clock SNR of 46,365 in a 1-Hz bandwidth and a fractional Allan deviation of 7.7×1013/τ7.7\times 10^{-13}/\sqrt\tau , with Hadamard deviation reaching 7.7×10157.7\times 10^{-15} at 10,000 s. This work pushes the fractional frequency stability of a compact Cs beam clock into the 1013/τ10^{-13}/\sqrt\tau regime, providing a pathway toward high-performance Cs frequency references for field-deployable precision timing, navigation, and synchronization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.06169,
  title  = {Dual-Faraday-laser-pumped cesium beam clock with $7.7\times 10^{-13}/\sqrtτ$ frequency stability},
  author = {Xiaomin Qin and Suyang Wei and Haijun Chen and Yufei Yan and Qiang Wei and Hangbo Shi and Zhiyang Wang and Zheng Xiao and Zijie Liu and Tiantian Shi and Jingbiao Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.06169},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures