Progress towards continuous superradiant lasing in a cavity-QED system

Superradiant lasers operate in the bad-cavity regime where, the coherence of the laser is stored in ultra-narrow atomic transitions. This makes them intrinsically robust against mechanical perturbations. Additionally, using the phenomenon of superradiance, this allows for efficient collection of light on ultra-narrow clock transitions with mHz linewidths. In order to make use of this ultra-narrow linewidth, this kind of laser must operate in a continuous manner. Most cold atom experiments operate in a time-sequenced fashion where successive cooling and trapping stages initialize the atoms, often leading to cycle times of several seconds or longer. We can continuously cool and load 3x10^{5 87}Sr atoms into a high-finesse optical cavity. These atoms are optically pumped into a single ground-state Zeeman level before being driven to the upper clock state. Using this atomic source, we plan to generate pulsed superradiance on the clock transition to measure, and ultimately minimize, the dephasing within our experiment, to pave the way for continuous emission.