@article{13578,
  author = {Zhijing Niu and Vera Schäfer and Haoqing Zhang and Cameron Wagner and Nathan Taylor and Dylan Young and Eric Song and Anjun Chu and Ana Rey and James Thompson},
  title = {Many-Body Gap Protection against Motional Dephasing of an Optical Clock Transition},
  abstract = {Quantum simulation and metrology with atoms, ions, and molecules often rely on using light fields to manipulate their internal states. The absorbed momentum from the light fields can induce spin-orbit coupling and associated motional-induced (Doppler) dephasing, which may limit the coherence time available for metrology and simulation. We experimentally demonstrate the suppression of Doppler dephasing on a strontium optical clock transition by enabling atomic interactions through a shared mode in a high-finesse optical ring cavity. The interactions create a many-body energy gap that increases with atom number, suppressing motional dephasing when it surpasses the dephasing energy scale. This collective approach offers an alternative to traditional methods, like Lamb-Dicke confinement or Mössbauer spectroscopy, for advancing optical quantum sensors and simulations.},
  year = {2025},
  journal = {Physical Review Letters},
  volume = {134},
  number = {11},
  pages = {113403},
  month = {mar},
  url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.113403},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.113403},
  note = {Publisher: American Physical Society},
}