Sanner Lab — Colorado State University
Lab news &
publications
Updates from the lab and selected publications — atomic physics, precision spectroscopy, and quantum sensing.
Lab news
Our recent collaborative paper with colleagues from Stevens and NIST (10.1103/qhj9-pc2b) was featured on Sabine Hossenfelder’s popular science channel. A 3/10 on the BS meter is not too shabby!
After extensive lab space renovations, we started building our experimental setup for Yb+ optical clock spectroscopy in Spring 2023. By now we have achieved state-of-the-art 171Yb+ clock performance along the electric quadrupole (E2) and electric octupole (E3) clock lines at 435 nm and 467 nm. The E3 clock has a systematic fractional uncertainty of 3×10−18 and a measured stability of 1.4×10−15 at 1 s. Mark’s paper about this milestone and other ideas will soon be on the arXiv (M. Lide, W. Hardin, and C. Sanner: Optical ion clock with engineered immunity to motion-induced frequency shifts). With NSF support we have in parallel set up a cryogenic ion trap assembly, where we plan to perform new precision tests of Nature’s fundamental symmetries and to directly explore the interplay of relativity and quantum physics.
Selected recent publications
Quantum Signatures of Proper Time in Optical Ion Clocks
Physical Review Letters 136, 163602 — 2026 10.1103/qhj9-pc2b
Geometric phase amplification in a clock interferometer for enhanced metrology
Science Advances 11, eadr6893 — 2025 10.1126/sciadv.adr6893
Observation of millihertz-level cooperative Lamb shifts in an optical atomic clock
Science 383, 384–387 — 2024 10.1126/science.adh4477
Pauli blocking of atom-light scattering
Science 374, 979 — 2021 10.1126/science.abh3483
Dipole-dipole frequency shifts in multilevel atoms
Physical Review Letters 127, 013401 — 2021 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.013401
Improved limits for violations of local position invariance from atomic clock comparisons
Physical Review Letters 126, 011102 — 2021 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.011102
Thermodynamics of a deeply degenerate SU(N)-symmetric Fermi gas
Nature Physics 16, 1216 — 2020 10.1038/s41567-020-0986-6
Engineering Quantum States of Matter for Atomic Clocks in Shallow Optical Lattices
Physical Review Letters 123, 123401 — 2019 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.123401
Optical clock comparison for Lorentz symmetry testing
Nature 567, 204–208 — 2019 10.1038/s41586-019-0972-2
Physical Review Letters 120, 173001 — 2018 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.173001
Autobalanced Ramsey Spectroscopy
Physical Review Letters 120, 053602 — 2018 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.053602
Single-Ion Atomic Clock with 3×10−18 Systematic Uncertainty
Physical Review Letters 116, 063001 — 2016 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.063001