Proposal of a truncated atomic beam fountain for reduction of collisional frequency shift

Abstract

We propose an atomic fountain clock with a truncated cold atomic beam to achieve both a low collisional frequency shift and high frequency stability. In this clock, the launching velocity of a cold atomic beam can be swept to reduce the atomic density in the interrogation region for the Ramsey resonance and to increase the atomic density in the detection region. Before the top of the beam arrives at the interrogation region, the cold atomic beam is truncated by turning off the cooling laser beams to remove the unnecessary light shift. The atomic density in the interrogation region is theoretically evaluated to be 0.04 times that in an ordinary atomic fountain with optical molasses for the same number of detected atoms. The frequency stability limit due to quantum projection noise is calculated to reach 6.4 × 10 −14 in 1 s from the number of detected atoms while the fractional collisional shift is estimated to be ∼ −2 × 10 −16 .