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An unsupervised machine learning algorithm utilizing nonlinear dimensionality reduction has been developed to interface with spectroscopic measurements from an atomic rubidium optical magnetometer. The magnetometer uses Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT) optical spectroscopy with atomic vapor cells in order to observe magneto-sensitive spin transitions of the 87Rb atom. The Rb EIT measurements result in the observation of seven transmission peaks associated with the available two-photon resonances between the Rb D1 line Zeeman sublevels. The developed algorithm correlates the waveform of the EIT spectra and the directionality of the local magnetic field using kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). The analysis, implemented with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel trick, was found to neatly cluster the EIT spectra according to the direction of the local magnetic field in the reduced dimensional feature space. The KPCA projections demonstrated a smooth curve in a three-dimensional feature space, and the resulting curve was modeled with a support vector regression (SVR) machine. We found that if the direction of the magnetic field is undefined initially, the measurement accuracy is better than 3 degrees in both azimuthal and longitudinal angles with respect to the real direction of the magnetic field. If the magnetometer is configured so that the azimuthal angle of the field is defined, the KPCA- SVR algorithm is capable of predicting the longitudinal angle of the local magnetic field within 1 degree of accuracy. These results suggest that the dimensionality reduction methods may be a powerful tool for approaching regression problems in optical spectroscopy.

We demonstrate strontium (Sr) atomic vapor cells having a total external volume of 0.63 cm3 that can operate above 300 °C for times exceeding 380 h. The cells are fabricated using micromachined silicon frames anodically bonded to glass windows that have a 20-nm thick protective layer of Al2O3 deposited on the interior surfaces. The presence of Sr vapor in the cell is confirmed through laser absorption spectroscopy for the 1S0 → 1P1 transition in Sr at 461 nm. Measurements of sub-Doppler linewidths indicated negligible (

Advances in sensing technology raise the possibility of creating neural interfaces that can more effectively restore or repair neural function and reveal fundamental properties of neural information processing. To realize the potential of these bioelectronic devices, it is necessary to understand the capabilities of emerging technologies and identify the best strategies to translate these technologies into products and therapies that will improve the lives of patients with neurological and other disorders. Here, we discuss emerging technologies for sensing brain activity, anticipated challenges for translation, and perspectives for how to best transition these technologies from academic research labs to useful products for neuroscience researchers and human patients.

Atomic systems have long provided a useful material platform with unique quantum properties. The efficient light-matter interaction in atomic vapors has led to numerous seminal scientific achievements including accurate and precise metrology and quantum devices. In the last few decades, the field of thin optical elements with miniscule features has been extensively studied demonstrating an unprecedented ability to control photonic degrees of freedom, both linearly and non-linearly, with applications spanning from photography and spatial light modulators to cataract surgery implants. Hybridization of atoms with such thin devices may offer a new material system allowing traditional vapor cells with enhanced functionality. Here, we fabricate and demonstrate chip-scale, quantum diffractive optical elements which map atomic states to the spatial distribution of diffracted light. Two foundational diffractive elements, lamellar gratings and Fresnel lenses, are hybridized with atomic channels containing hot atomic vapors which demonstrate exceptionally strong frequency dependent behaviors. Providing the design tools for chip-scale atomic diffractive optical elements develops a path for a variety of compact thin quantum-optical elements., Comment: 9 Pages, including supplementary

This article contributes to the literature on small business and regulation by presenting and testing a comprehensive framework for explaining government motivations to implement regulatory reform targeting micro companies as beneficiaries. Following Haines, I adopt an alternative approach to the conventional market failure or equity rationales to explain government reform. Reform initiatives are conceptualised in terms of the management of three types of risk – actuarial, sociocultural and political. Combining a critical discourse analysis with an argumentative approach to policy analysis of documentary sources relevant to the Small Companies (Micro-Entities’ Accounts) Regulations 2013, I propose three contributions to the literature. First, reform policies are prompted by diverse risk concerns; they cannot be explained solely in terms of addressing market failure or equity considerations alone. Second, regulatory reform might, in certain circumstances, be better explained as a strategy for managing political and sociocultural risk rather than the actuarial risks that policymakers use explicitly to justify government action. Third, reforms might be motivated more by political and sociocultural risk where the legal change implemented is minimal, where robust research evidence to support the reform is limited or non-existent, or where the issue is of low salience to business owners themselves.

We describe a high-performance, compact optical frequency standard based on a microfabricated Rb vapor cell and a low-noise, external cavity diode laser operating on the Rb two-photon transition at 778 nm. The optical standard achieves an instability of 1.8x10$^{-13}$/$\sqrt{\tau}$ for times less than 100 s and a flicker noise floor of 1x10$^{-14}$ out to 6000 s. At long integration times, the instability is limited by variations in optical probe power and the AC Stark shift. The retrace was measured to 5.7x10$^{-13}$ after 30 hours of dormancy. Such a simple, yet high-performance optical standard could be suitable as an accurate realization of the SI meter or, if coupled with an optical frequency comb, as a compact atomic clock comparable to a hydrogen maser., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

Point source atom interferometry (PSI) is an atom-optical method that measures one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation from atom-interferometric fringe images. The number of fringes in an image can be less than or larger than one, depending on the system rotation rate and the atom interferometer's sensitivity setting. Previously used methods for analyzing the fringes, such as parametric fittings, are not suitable for a wide range of rotation rates. We introduce a new experimental method that is effective in either case. Our approach does not require prior knowledge of fringe contrast, orientation, frequency, and phase.

We demonstrate a simple stacked scheme that enables absorption imaging through a hole in the surface of a grating magneto-optical trap (GMOT) chip, placed immediately below a micro-fabricated vacuum cell. The imaging scheme is capable of overcoming the reduced optical access and surface scatter that is associated with this chip-scale platform, while further permitting both trapping and imaging of the atoms from a single incident laser beam. The through-hole imaging is used to characterise the impact of the reduced optical overlap volume of the GMOT in the chip-scale cell, with an outlook to an optimised atom number in low volume systems., 5 pages, 3 figures

International audience; Point source atom interferometry (PSI) uses the velocity distribution in a cold atom cloud to simultaneously measure one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation from the spatial distribution of interferometer phase in an expanded cloud of atoms. Previously, the interferometer phase has been found from the phase, orientation, and period of the resulting spatial atomic interference fringe images. For practical applications in inertial sensing and precision measurement, it is important to be able to measure a wide range of system rotation rates, corresponding to interferograms with far less than one full interference fringe to very many fringes. Interferogram analysis techniques based on image processing used previously for PSI are challenging to implement for low rotation rates that generate less than one full interference fringe across the cloud. We introduce a new experimental method that is closely related to optical phase-shifting interferometry that is effective in extracting rotation values from signals consisting of fractional fringes as well as many fringes without prior knowledge of the rotation rate. The method finds the interferometer phase for each pixel in the image from four interferograms, each with a controlled Raman laser phase shift, to reconstruct the underlying atomic interferometer phase map without image processing.

Light shifts are known to be an important limitation to the mid- and long-term fractional frequency stability of different types of atomic clocks. In this article, we demonstrate the experimental implementation of an anti-light-shift interrogation protocol onto a continuous-wave (cw) microcell atomic clock based on coherent population trapping (CPT). The method, inspired by the autobalanced Ramsey spectroscopy technique demonstrated in pulsed atomic clocks, consists in the extraction of atomic based information from two successive light-shifted clock frequencies obtained at two different laser-power values. Two error signals, computed from the linear combination of signals acquired along a symmetric sequence, are managed in a dual-loop configuration to generate a clock frequency free from light shift. Using this method, the sensitivity of the clock frequency to both laser-power and microwave-power variations can be reduced by more than an order of magnitude compared to normal operation. In the present experiment, the consideration of the nonlinear light-shift dependence allows enhancement of the light-shift mitigation. The implemented technique allows an improvement of the clock Allan deviation for time scales higher than 1000 s. This method can be applied in various kinds of atomic clocks such as CPT-based atomic clocks, double-resonance $\mathrm{Rb}$ clocks, or cell-stabilized lasers.

We evaluate whether the theory of effectuation provides – or could provide – a powerful causal explanation of the process of new venture creation. We do this by conducting an analysis of the principal concepts introduced by effectuation theory. Effectuation theory has become a highly influential cognitive science-based approach to understanding how nascent entrepreneurs start businesses under conditions of uncertainty. But by reducing the process of venture creation to a decision-making logic, effectuation theory pays insufficient regard to the substantial, pervasive and enduring influence of social-structural and cultural contexts on venture creation. Powerful explanations should conceive of venture creation as a sociohistorical process emergent from the interaction of structural, cultural and agential causal powers and must be able to theorise, fallibly, how nascent entrepreneurs form particular firms in particular times and places. We conclude that effectuation’s contribution to entrepreneurship scholarship is more limited than its advocates claim because it can offer only an under-socialised, ahistorical account of venture creation. Failure to theorise adequately the influence of structural and cultural contexts on venture creation implicitly grants nascent entrepreneurs excessive powers of agency.

Chip-scale atomic devices built around micro-fabricated alkali vapor cells are at the forefront of compact metrology and atomic sensors. We demonstrate a micro-fabricated vapor cell that is actively-pumped to ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) to achieve laser cooling. A grating magneto optical trap (GMOT) is incorporated with the 4 mm-thick Si/glass vacuum cell to demonstrate the feasibility of a fully-miniaturized laser cooling platform. A two-step optical excitation process in rubidium is used to overcome surface-scatter limitations to the GMOT imaging. The unambiguous miniaturization and form-customizability made available with micro-fabricated UHV cells provide a promising platform for future compact cold-atom sensors., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

We show that the light shift in atomic clocks can be suppressed using time variation of the interrogation field intensity. By measuring the clock output at two intensity levels, error signals can be generated that simultaneously stabilize a local oscillator to an atomic transition and correct for the shift of this transition caused by the interrogating optical field. These methods are suitable for optical clocks using one- and two-photon transitions, as well as for microwave clocks based on coherent population trapping or direct interrogation. The proposed methods can be widely used both for high-precision scientific instruments and for a wide range of commercial clocks, including chip-scale atomic clocks., 7 pages, 6 figures

Orthogonal control of both degrees of freedom of a Kerr comb soliton allows high-precision atomic spectroscopy and stabilization., Microresonator-based soliton frequency combs, microcombs, have recently emerged to offer low-noise, photonic-chip sources for applications, spanning from timekeeping to optical-frequency synthesis and ranging. Broad optical bandwidth, brightness, coherence, and frequency stability have made frequency combs important to directly probe atoms and molecules, especially in trace gas detection, multiphoton light-atom interactions, and spectroscopy in the extreme ultraviolet. Here, we explore direct microcomb atomic spectroscopy, using a cascaded, two-photon 1529-nm atomic transition in a rubidium micromachined cell. Fine and simultaneous repetition rate and carrier-envelope offset frequency control of the soliton enables direct sub-Doppler and hyperfine spectroscopy. Moreover, the entire set of microcomb modes are stabilized to this atomic transition, yielding absolute optical-frequency fluctuations at the kilohertz level over a few seconds and

We present operation of a photonically integrated wavelength reference at 780 nm using a dual beam geometry. The dual beams are generated by a pair of extreme mode converting grating beam expanders that generate a pair of overlapped, counter-propagating beams inside the volume of a microfabricated vapor cell. We perform spectroscopy of rubidium and a characterize the stability of laser locked to a sub-Doppler transition at 780 nm. By stabilizing the laser to a known transition in an atomic vapor, this device can serve as a quantum wavelength reference. The dual beam geometry also enables investigation of two-photon absorption in a three-level ladder configuration in rubidium using excitation at 780 nm + 776 nm.

This article explores the culture-regulations-gender triad in relation to small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs’) performance. Using a firm-level panel dataset drawn from 27 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia between 2005 and 2014, we show that women and men experience and respond differently to regulations. Women take regulations very seriously and as a result, their SMEs see improved performance, whereas men discount the influence of regulations which then depresses the performance of their SMEs. However, when women respond to regulatory enforcers, it erodes the performance of their SMEs, whereas when men engage enforcers, the performance of their SMEs improves. The fact that women and men experience and respond to the same regulations differently—regardless of country effect and whether their SMEs are high- or low-performing businesses—suggests that regulations perpetuate gender biases, thus impacting not only individuals but even the organizations they lead. Our study expands gendered institutions theory by clarifying how regulations diffuse cultural values and influence women and men, as well as their SMEs, differently.

International audience; We show that the light shift in atomic clocks can be suppressed using time variation of the interrogation field intensity. By measuring the clock output at two intensity levels, error signals can be generated that simultaneously stabilize a local oscillator to an atomic transition and correct for the shift of this transition caused by the interrogating optical field. These methods are suitable for optical clocks using one- andtwo-photon transitions, as well as for microwave clocks based on coherent population trapping or direct interrogation. The proposed methods can be widely used both for high-precision scientific instruments and for a wide range of commercial clocks, including chip-scale atomic clocks.

We investigate a solid-state, reversible, alkali-ion battery (AIB) capable of regulating the density of alkali atoms in a vacuum system used for the production of laser-cooled atoms. The cold-atom sample can be used with in-vacuum chronoamperometry as a diagnostic for the voltage-controlled electrochemical reaction that sources or sinks alkali atoms into the vapor. In a combined reaction-diffusion-limited regime, we show that the number of laser-cooled atoms in a magneto-optical trap can be increased both by initially loading the AIB from the vapor for longer, and by using higher voltages across the AIB when atoms are subsequently sourced back into the vapor. The time constants associated with the change in atom number in response to a change in AIB voltage are in the range of 0.5 s - 40 s. The AIB alkali reservoir is demonstrated to survive oxidization during atmospheric exposure, simplifying reservoir loading prior to vacuum implementation as a replacement for traditional resistively-heated dispensers. The AIB capabilities may provide an improved atom number stability in next-generation atomic clocks and sensors, while also facilitating fast loading and increased interrogation times., 7 pages, 5 figures

The use of matter-wave interferometry to detect inertial forces is already a powerful tool in precision measurement, but extending it beyond the lab to navigation applications requires optimization for compact setups. Here researchers characterize point-source atom interferometry (PSI) in a centimeter-scale cell, using an expanding cloud of cold atoms and an optical Raman interaction for simultaneous measurement of the system's acceleration along the Raman laser beams plus its rotation vector projected into the plane perpendicular to the beams. The sensitivity measurements presented here inform the further development of quantum inertial sensing that balances size and performance.

We demonstrate a novel way to form and deplete a vapor-cell magneto-optic trap (MOT) using a reversible, solid-state alkali-metal source (AMS) via an applied polarized voltage. Using ~100 mW of electrical power, a trapped-atom number of 5x10^6 has been achieved starting from near zero and the timescales of the MOT formation and depletion of ~1 s. This fast, reversible, and low power alkali-atom source is desirable in both tabletop and portable cold-atom systems. The core technology of this device should translate readily to other alkali and alkaline-earth elements that could find a wide range of uses in cold-atom systems and instruments., Comment: 7 pages

International audience; Point source atom interferometry, employing optical Raman pulses and a cold atom source, enables measurements of rotation and acceleration in a compact experimental package. This system is uniquely sensitive to rotations in the plane perpendicular to the Raman beamline. Here we discuss our experiment’s sensitivity, stability, systematic errors, and other performance-limiting factors both fundamentaland technical. Our current measurements for the sensitivity to the magnitude and direction of the rotation vector are 0.6 mrad/s and 5 mrad, respectively.

International audience; We present a brief review of the rapidly growing field of autobalanced Ramsey spectroscopy followed by a detailed discussion and review of two novel techniques that were developed and tested in our laboratory: displaced frequency-jump Ramsey spectroscopy and combined error signal spectroscopy. These two techniques are related to, yet different from autobalanced Ramsey spectroscopy. The use of these techniques in a cold-atom clock based on coherent population trapping has reduced instabilities from variations in light-shift parameters by at least one order of magnitude. In each of these techniques the Ramsey sequence adapts to cancel light shifts and drifts.

International audience; In point source atom interferometry (PSI), a cloud of laser-cooled atom expands within a pair of counterpropagatingRaman laser beams and, after a beamsplitter-mirror-beamsplitter Raman pulse sequence, asingle snapshot of the expanded cloud allows simultaneous measurements of one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation. In PSI, the thermal expansion of the cold-atom cloud, which is undesirable in other atom interferometry methods, is used to establish a position-velocity correlation in the expanded atom cloud. This correlation is employed to map the velocity dependence of the interferometric phaseshift onto a two-dimensional spatial image plane. As a result, the thermal velocity spread of the cloud of laser-cooled atoms facilitates the parallel operation of many atom interferometers, which yields the simultaneous multi-axis sensitivity. PSI provides a new approach to applications of atom interferometers in navigation and space science. For example, the 2D rotation measurement with PSI can be used to find geographic north or to measure the precession of a rotation vector. We have developed a scheme using PSI that is amenable to portable applications and we have demonstrated the measurement of a rotation vector in a plane [1]. We will present our recent results on evaluating the performance and systematic errors in a compact setup and discuss our proposals to address the challenges toward implementing ahigh-precision and portable PSI system.

We have produced a sample of laser-cooled atoms in a micro-fabricated alkali vapor cell using a grating MOT to direct the beams. We show that by detecting the blue fluorescence resulting from a two-photon cascade transition, we improve the rejection of cooling light scattered from the grating.

International audience; Light-induced frequency shifts can be a key limiting contribution to the mid- and long-term frequency instabilities in atomic clocks. In this letter,we demonstrate the experimental implementation of the combined error signal interrogation protocol to a cold-atom clock based on coherent populationtrapping (CPT) and Ramsey spectroscopy. The method uses a single error signal that results from the normalized combination of two errorsignals extracted from two Ramsey sequences of different dark periods. The single combined error signal is used to stabilize the atomic clock frequency.Compared to the standard Ramsey-CPT interrogation, this method reduces the clock frequency sensitivity to light-shift variations bymore than one order of magnitude. This method can be applied in various kinds of Ramsey-based atomic clocks, sensors, and instruments.

A miniature atomic scalar magnetometer based on the rubidium isotope 87Rb was developed for operation in space. The instrument design implements both Mx and Mz mode operation and leverages a novel microelectromechanical system (MEMS) fabricated vapor cell and a custom silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit. The vapor cell has a volume of only 1 mm3 so that it can be efficiently heated to its operating temperature by a specially designed, low-magnetic-field-generating resistive heater implemented in multiple metal layers of the transparent sapphire substrate of the SOS-CMOS chips. The SOS-CMOS chip also hosts the Helmholtz coil and associated circuitry to stimulate the magnetically sensitive atomic resonance and temperature sensors. The prototype instrument has a total mass of fewer than 500 g and uses less than 1 W of power, while maintaining a sensitivity of 15 pT/√Hz at 1 Hz, comparable to present state-of-the-art absolute magnetometers.

Optical frequency standards, or lasers stabilized to atomic or molecular transitions, are widely used in length metrology and laser ranging, provide a backbone for optical communications and lie at the heart of next-generation optical atomic clocks. Here we demonstrate a compact, low-power optical frequency reference based on the Doppler-free, two-photon transition in rubidium-87 at 778 nm implemented on a micro-optics breadboard. Our optical reference achieves a fractional frequency instability of 2.9×10−12/ τ for averaging times τ less than 103 s, has a volume of ≈35 cm3 and operates on ≈450 mW of electrical power. The advanced optical integration presented here demonstrates a key step towards the development of compact optical clocks and the broad dissemination of SI-traceable wavelength references.