Understand
Narrow linewidth optical atomic transitions provide a valuable resource for frequency metrology, and form the basis of today's most precise and accurate clocks.
- Recent experiments have demonstrated that ensembles of atoms can be interfaced with the mode of an optical cavity using such transitions, and that atom-cavity interactions can dominate over decoherence processes even when the atomic transition that mediates the interactions is very weak.
- This scenario enables new opportunities for optical frequency metrology, including techniques for nondestructive readout and entanglement enhancement for optical lattice clocks, methods for cavity-enhanced laser frequency stabilization, and high-precision active optical frequency references based on superradiant emission.
- This tutorial provides a pedagogical description of the physics governing atom-cavity coupling with narrow linewidth optical transitions, and describes several examples of applications to optical frequency metrology.