Optical Clock Arrays for Quantum Metrology

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Many aspects of the modern world are underpinned by precise timing and synchronisation, from financial trading and power grids, to satellite navigation. This precise timing is provided by atomic clocks which are currently based on microwave transitions in atoms like caesium. However, atomic clock research is currently undergoing a revolution, as clocks switch from microwave transitions to optical transitions, which has enabled the performance of state-of-the-art clocks to improve by a factor of over one hundred in just ten years.Ultimately the performance of these clocks will be limited by statistics - the accuracy of measurements is determined by the number of independent trials (much like measuring the probability that a coin is fair by tossing it many times). In practice, the maximum number of atoms that can be used in such a clock is limited. However it has been known for over thirty years that this limit can be broken using a quantum property known as entanglement, where the atoms in the clock are correlated rather than independent.The big challenge that we address in this proposal is to create the right kind of entanglement in an optical atomic clock for the first time. To do this we will build a new type of optical atomic clock where each atom can be controlled independently. To correlate the atoms, we will exploit state-of-the-art methods based on exciting the atoms to high-energy states known as Rydberg states. The breakthrough that we target is the first proof-of-principle demonstration of an entanglement-enhanced measurements in an optical atomic clock.