Engineering Quantum States of Matter for Atomic Clocks in Shallow Optical Lattices

We investigate the effects of stimulated scattering of optical lattice photons on atomic coherence times in a state-of-the art ^{87}\mathrm{Sr}optical lattice clock. Such scattering processes are found to limit the achievable coherence times to less than 12 s (corresponding to a quality factor of 1\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{16}, significantly shorter than the predicted 145(40) s lifetime of ^{87}\mathrm{Sr}s excited clock...