Enhancing optical lattice clock coherence times with erasure conversion

Abstract: The pursuit of ever-longer optical coherence is central to advancing the precision of optical clocks. Synchronous differential clock comparisons have now demonstrated atomic coherence times on optical transitions that far exceed the coherence time of the clock laser. In optical lattice and tweezer clocks the atom coherence times are then primarily limited by errors induced by Raman scattering from the trapping light, as well as radiative decay due to the finite lifetime of the excited clock state, broadening and loss from two-body collisions, and loss due to heating. Importantly, many of these errors take the atoms out of the clock transition subspace, and can therefore be converted into "erasure" errors if the appropriate readout scheme is employed. Here we experimentally demonstrate a hyperfine-resolved readout technique for 87Sr optical lattice clocks that mitigates decoherence from Raman scattering induced by the lattice trapping light as well as radiative decay. By employing hyperfine-resolved readout in synchronous differential comparisons between 87Sr ensembles with both Ramsey and spin echo spectroscopy sequences, we achieve enhanced atomic coherence times exceeding 100 s and 150 s, respectively, and demonstrate that the differential instability becomes less sensitive to the interrogation time, enabling longer coherent measurements without a reduction in performance. We anticipate that this hyperfine-resolved readout technique will benefit applications of state-of-the-art optical lattice clock comparisons in which the coherence times or stabilities are constrained by Raman scattering or radiative decay.