Deployment of a transportable Yb optical lattice clock.

We report on the first deployment of a ytterbium (Yb) transportable optical lattice clock (TOLC), commercially shipping the clock 3000 km from Boulder, Colorado, to Washington DC. The system, composed of a rigidly mounted optical reference cavity, an atomic physics package, and an optical frequency comb, fully realizes an independent frequency standard for comparisons in the optical and microwave domains. The shipped Yb TOLC was fully operational within 2 days of arrival, enabling frequency comparison with a rubidium (Rb) fountain at the United States Naval Observatory (USNO).

Robust inertial sensing with point-source atom interferometry for interferograms spanning a partial period.

Point source atom interferometry (PSI) uses the velocity distribution in a cold atom cloud to simultaneously measure one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation from the spatial distribution of interferometer phase in an expanded cloud of atoms. Previously, the interferometer phase has been found from the phase, orientation, and period of the resulting spatial atomic interference fringe images. For practical applications in inertial sensing and precision measurement, it is important to be able to measure a wide range of system rotation rates, corresponding to interferograms with far less than one full interference fringe to very many fringes.

Single-Source Multiaxis Cold-Atom Interferometer in a Centimeter-Scale Cell.

Using point-source atom interferometry (PSI), we characterize the sensitivity of a multiaxis gyroscope based on free-space Raman interrogation of a single source of cold atoms in a glass vacuum cell. The instrument simultaneously measures the acceleration in the direction of the Raman-laser beams and the projection of the rotation vector onto the plane perpendicular to that direction. The sensitivities for the magnitude and direction of the rotation-vector measurement are 0.