Floquet maser

Abstract

The invention of the maser stimulated many revolutionary technologies such as lasers and atomic clocks. Despite enormous progress, the realizations of masers are still confined to a limited variety of systems, in particular, the physics of masers remains unexplored in periodically driven (Floquet) systems, which are generally defined by time-periodic Hamiltonians and enable to observe many exotic phenomena such as time crystals. Here we investigate the Floquet system of periodically driven 129Xe gas under damping feedback, and surprisingly observe a multi-mode maser that oscillates at frequencies of transitions between Floquet states. Our findings extend maser techniques to Floquet systems, and open a new avenue to probe Floquet phenomena unaffected by decoherence, enabling a new class of maser sensors. As a first application, our maser offers a unique capability of measuring low-frequency (1-100 mHz) magnetic fields with femtotesla-level sensitivity, which is significantly better than state-of-the-art magnetometers, and can be immediately applied to, for example, ultralight dark matter searches.