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Traditional lasers function using resonant cavities, in which the round-trip optical path is exactly equal to an integer multiple of the intracavity wavelengths to constructively enhance the spontaneous emission rate. By taking advantage of the enhancement from the resonant cavity, the narrowest sub-10-mHz-linewidth laser and a $10^{-16}$-fractional-frequency-stability superradiant active optical clock (AOC) have been achieved. However, a laser with atomic spontaneous radiation being destructively inhibited in an anti-resonant cavity, where the atomic resonance is exactly between two adjacent cavity resonances, has not been reported. Herein, we experimentally demonstrate inhibited stimulated emission and termed it an inhibited laser. Compared with traditional superradiant AOCs, which exhibit superiority in terms of the high suppression of cavity noise, the suppression of the cavity-pulling effect of an inhibited laser can be further improved by a factor of $(2F/pi)^2$, i.e., 2.07 in this work, which was improved from 26 to 53 times. This study will guide further development of AOCs with better stability, and thus, it is significant for quantum metrology and may lead to new research in the laser physics and cavity quantum electrodynamics fields., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

An active optical clock based on highly charged Nd$^{9+}$ ion is proposed for the first time. The clock can offer ultra-narrow linewidth at the $\upmu$Hz-level which is more than two-order of magnitude below the currently recorded laser linewidth. Operating at 605(90) nm superradiation lasing transition between the $5p^2~4f$ ground state and one of the long-lived $5p~4f^2$ excited state, the proposed active clock is inherently immune against the cavity noise which provides high stability. The clock serves as a sensitive probe with high sensitivity to variation of the fine-structure constant with accuracies below 10$^{-19}$ level. Sophisticated relativistic many-body methods are employed to predict related atomic properties that have corroborated the above findings., Comment: 5 papges, 2 figures, 1 SM

A thermal atomic ensemble-based laser source with superior frequency stability is proposed that relies on the accumulated contributions from an abundance of nonzero-transverse-velocity atomic ensembles. Compared with the traditional case in which only atoms with near-zero transverse velocities are utilized, the amplitude of the optical Ramsey fringes for a thermal calcium beam can be dramatically enhanced by three orders of magnitude or more, thus, the signal-to-noise ratio can be improved 33-fold. Based on the recent results of atomic interferometry-based laser stabilization, a quantum projection noise-limited frequency instability less than 2E-17/tau^0.5 is feasible. Such an ultrastable laser has promising applications in diverse areas, including metrology and astronomy.

We demonstrate state-of-the-art technique of an active clock to provide a continuous superradiant lasing signal using an ensemble of trapped Cs atoms in the optical lattice. A magic wavelength of the proposed |7S1/2; F = 4, MF = 0> - |6P3/2; F = 3, MF = 0> clock transition in Cs atom is identified at 1181 nm for constructing the optical lattice. Pertinent optical lines are also found for pumping and repumping atoms from their ground states. A fractional uncertainty about 10-15 level to the clock frequency has been predicted by carrying out rigorous calculations of several atomic properties. The bad-cavity operational mode of the active clock is anticipated to improve its short-term stability remarkably by suppressing intrinsic thermal fluctuations. Thus, a composite clock system with better in both short-term and long-term stabilities can be built by combining the above proposed active clock with another high-accuracy passive optical clock.

The residual cavity-pulling effect limits further narrowing of linewidth in dual-wavelength (DW) good-bad-cavity active optical clocks (AOCs). In this paper, we for the first time experimentally realize the cavity-length stabilization of the 1064/1470 nm DW-AOCs by utilizing the phase locking technique of two independent 1064 nm good-cavity lasers. The frequency tracking accuracy between the two main-cavities of DW-AOCs is better than $3 \times {10^{ - 16}}$ at 1 s, and can reach $1 \times {10^{ - 17}}$ at 1000 s. Each 1470 nm bad-cavity laser achieves a most probable linewidth of 53 Hz, which is about a quarter of that without phase locking. The influence of the asynchronous cavity-lengths variation between two DW laser systems is suppressed., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

Taking advantages of ultra-narrow bandwidth and high noise rejection performance of the Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter (FADOF), simultaneously with the coherent amplification of atomic stimulated emission, a stimulated amplified Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter (SAFADOF) at cesium 1470 nm is realized. The SAFADOF is able to significantly amplify very weak laser signals and reject noise in order to obtain clean signals in strong background. Experiment results show that, for a weak signal of 50 pW, the gain factor can be larger than 25000 (44 dB) within a bandwidth as narrow as 13 MHz. Having this ability to amplify weak signals with low background contribution, the SAFADOF finds outstanding potential applications in weak signal detections.