We present an overview of recent work to develop chipscale atomic devices such as frequency references and magnetometers. These devices take advantage of advances over the last ten years in the fields of micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), precision atomic spectroscopy and semiconductor lasers. The convergence of processes and techniques from these three disparate areas allows for highly compact, low-power sensors with exceptional sensitivity and stability. We will discuss in detail several important ongoing activities in our laboratory including recent advances in alkali cell fabrication and new physics package designs for chip-scale atomic clocks and magnetometers. Finally, we discuss opportunities related to the coupling of resonant, magnetic microstructures to atoms for highly compact, low power sensor applications.

This paper presents a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) for application in chip-scale atomic frequency references. At 3.4GHz (half of the Rubidium atom ground-state hyperfine transition frequency), the VCO demonstrates low phase noise (-33dBc@100Hz and -92dBc@10kHz) at 4.5mW power consumption with a circuit footprint <0.5cm 2 . The temperature stability is 0ppm/°C at room temperature, and does not exceed40ppm/°C over the range of -5°C to +65°C. Locking to the Coherent Population Trapping (CPT) resonance of a NIST Rb clock is enabled by a weakly-coupled varactor diode which provides ~3MHz of tuning range. The oscillator is implemented using low-cost off-the-shelf surface-mount components, including a micro-coaxial resonator. To the authors' knowledge, this VCO has the lowest simultaneous size, phase noise, DC power consumption and thermal drift published in the literature.

Abstract-We demonstrate component-level functionality of the three critical subsystems for a miniature atomic clock based on microfabrication techniques: the physics package, the local oscillator and the control electronics. In addition, we demonstrate that these three components operating together achieve a short-term frequency instability of 6×10 -10

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