atomic clocks

In an effort to improve atomic clocks, JQI Fellow Kartik Srinivasan and his colleagues have been exploring how light is altered as it races repeatedly around a minuscule track on a chip. In an article in Nature, they describe a new way to use the devices to make precision measurements of light. The new technique might eliminate the need for several large, energy-hungry components in next-generation optical atomic clocks and other metrology tasks.

The digital age has seen electronics, including computer chips, shrink in size at an amazing rate, with ever tinier chips powering devices like smartphones, laptops and even autonomous drones. In the wake of this progress, another miniature technology has been gaining steam: integrated photonics. Photons, which are the quantum particles of light, have some advantages over electrons, the namesakes of electronics. For some applications, photons offer faster and more accurate information transfer and use less power than electrons. And because on-chip photonics are largely built using the same technology created for the electronics industry, they carry the promise of integrating electronics and photonics on the same chip.

In this episode of Relatively Certain, Dina Genkina sits down with JQI Adjunct Fellow Marianna Safronova, a physics professor at the University of Delaware, and JQI Fellow Charles Clark, an adjunct professor of physics at UMD and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to talk about how precision measurements with atoms might shed some light on matter that’s otherwise dark.