Optical fiber link for ultra-stable frequency dissemination and atomic clock comparisons

International audienceThe transfer of ultra-stable frequencies between distant laboratories is required by many applications from fundamental metrology to high-precision measurements. For that purpose, optical fibre links have been intensively studied over the last decade. They have demonstrated impressive results far beyond the GPS capabilities on distances up to 2000 km, thanks to an active compensation of the fiber propagation noise.Up to now, optical links has been mainly implemented between two labs, when future applications will require the development of metrological fiber networks. Towards this goal, we have developed a few techniques which allow us to distribute the ultrastable optical signal to many users simultaneously. We have designed repeater laser stations, which can be used to build a cascaded link or to distribute the ultrastable signal among two optical links [1]. These stations allow us also to compare the output end signals of two optical links. These versatile stations will be a key-component of the national metrological network currently being developed in France within the Refimeve+ project. To complete the network, we have demonstrated the extraction of the ultrastable signal from a main link and its seeding to a secondary link [2].Optical links are already been successfully used for clocks comparison. Recently we were able to compare the atomic clocks of the French and German National Metrology Institutes through two connected optical links of total length 1415-km [3]. We found that the two fully independent Sr lattice optical clocks at the two sites agreed to better than 5x10-17 limited only by the clocks uncertainties. A fractional statistical uncertainty of 3x10-17 was reached after only 1000 s averaging time, which is 10 times better, and more than four orders of magnitude faster than with any other existing frequency transfer method. The atomic fountain primary frequency standards from the two institutes were also compared and they were found to agree well within their combined uncertainties of a few 10-16 [4]