The ultimate bounds to precision of atomic clock frequency measurement techniques

Abstract

We investigate the ultimate quantum limits to the achievable uncertainty in the estimation of the transition frequency between two atomic levels. We focus on Rabi, Ramsey, and coherent population trapping (CPT) techniques, which are widely employed in experiments. We prove that in the Rabi and Ramsey schemes measuring the atomic population allows one to reach the minimum uncertainty, but, for the CPT setup, a measurement involving the coherences between the levels results in a further improvement of the estimation. As a figure of merit, we consider the Fisher information of the population measurement and compare its value to the quantum Fisher information, corresponding to the maximum precision, optimized over all the possible feasible measurements.