Progress towards superradiance in a continuous cavity-QED system

Laser-cooled neutral atoms are an excellent platform for quantum computation, sensing, and probing new physics. 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. This progress advances our goal of creating a continuous superradiant laser. Superradiant lasers store phase memory in ultra-narrow optical transitions within highly coherent atoms. This makes them intrinsically robust against vibrations and well-suited for ultra-narrow mHz linewidth lasers.