Harmonic Fine Tuning and Triaxial Spatial Anisotropy of Dressed Atomic Spins.

The addition of a weak oscillating field modifying strongly dressed spins enhances and enriches the system quantum dynamics. Through low-order harmonic mixing, the bichromatic driving generates additional rectified static field acting on the spin system. The secondary field allows for a fine tuning of the atomic response and produces effects not accessible with a single dressing field, such as a spatial triaxial anisotropy of the spin coupling constants and acceleration of the spin dynamics. This tuning-dressed configuration introduces an extra handle for the system full engineering in quantum control applications. Tuning amplitude, harmonic content, spatial orientation, and phase relation are control parameters. A theoretical analysis, based on perturbative approach, is experimentally tested by applying a bichromatic radiofrequency field to an optically pumped Cs atomic vapour. The theoretical predictions are precisely confirmed by measurements performed with tuning frequencies up to the third harmonic.

Nonlinear Frequency-Sweep Correction of Tunable Electromagnetic Sources.

Tunable electromagnetic (EM) sources, such as voltage-controlled oscillators, micro-electromechanical systems, or diode lasers are often required to be linear during frequency-sweep modulation. In many cases, it might also be sufficient that the degree of the nonlinearity can be well controlled. Without further efforts, these conditions are rarely achieved using free-running sources. Based on a predistortion voltage ramp, we develop in this paper a simple and universal method that minimizes the nonlinear frequency response of tunable EM sources. Using a current-driven quantum cascade laser as an example, we demonstrate that the nonlinearity can easily be reduced by a factor of ten when using a single distortion parameter . In the investigation of the IR absorption spectrum of ozone at 10 , an even better reduction of the frequency-scale error by two orders of magnitude is obtained by using the predistortion method to generate an essentially purely quadratic sweep frequency dependence that can be inverted easily to retrieve precise molecular line positions. After having tested our method on a variety of EM sources, we anticipate a wide range of applications in a variety of fields.

Composite laser-pulses spectroscopy for high-accuracy optical clocks: a review of recent progress and perspectives.

Probing an atomic resonance without disturbing it is an ubiquitous issue in physics. This problem is critical in high-accuracy spectroscopy or for the next generation of atomic optical clocks. Ultra-high resolution frequency metrology requires sophisticated interrogation schemes and robust protocols handling pulse length errors and residual frequency detuning offsets. This review reports recent progress and perspective in such schemes, using sequences of composite laser-pulses tailored in pulse duration, frequency and phase, inspired by NMR techniques and quantum information processing. After a short presentation of Rabi technique and NMR-like composite pulses allowing efficient compensation of electromagnetic field perturbations to achieve robust population transfers, composite laser-pulses are investigated within Ramsey's method of separated oscillating fields in order to generate non-linear compensation of probe-induced frequency shifts. Laser-pulses protocols such as hyper-Ramsey, modified hyper-Ramsey, generalized hyper-Ramsey and hybrid schemes as auto-balanced Ramsey spectroscopy are reviewed. These techniques provide excellent protection against both probe induced light-shift perturbations and laser intensity variations. More sophisticated schemes generating synthetic frequency-shifts are presented. They allow to reduce or completely eliminate imperfect correction of probe-induced frequency-shifts even in presence of decoherence due to the laser line-width. Finally, two universal protocols are presented which provide complete elimination of probe-induced frequency shifts in the general case where both decoherence and relaxation dissipation effects are present by using exact analytic expressions for phase-shifts and the clock frequency detuning. These techniques might be applied to atomic, molecular and nuclear frequency metrology, Ramsey-type mass spectrometry as well as precision spectroscopy.

Magic radio-frequency dressing of nuclear spins in high-accuracy optical clocks.

A Zeeman-insensitive optical clock atomic transition is engineered when nuclear spins are dressed by a nonresonant radio-frequency field. For fermionic species as (87)Sr, (171)Yb, and (199)Hg, particular ratios between the radio-frequency driving amplitude and frequency lead to "magic" magnetic values where a net cancelation of the Zeeman clock shift and a complete reduction of first-order magnetic variations are produced within a relative uncertainty below the 10(-18) level. An Autler-Townes continued fraction describing a semiclassical radio-frequency dressed spin is numerically computed and compared to an analytical quantum description including higher-order magnetic field corrections to the dressed energies.

Cancellation of stark shifts in optical lattice clocks by use of pulsed Raman and electromagnetically induced transparency techniques.

We propose a combination of electromagnetically induced transparency-Raman and pulsed spectroscopy techniques to accurately cancel frequency shifts arising from electromagnetically induced transparency fields in forbidden optical clock transitions of alkaline earth atoms. At appropriate detunings, time-separated laser pulses are designed to trap atoms in coherent superpositions while eliminating off-resonance ac Stark contributions, achieving efficient population transfer up to 60% with inaccuracy <10(-17). Results from the wave-function formalism are confirmed by the density matrix approach.