Optical lattice clocks

Optical lattice clocks, which were first imagined in 2000, should allow to achieve unprecedented performances in the domain of atomic clocks. We first discuss here the principle of operation of these clocks, in particular trapping atoms in the Lamb-Dicke regime and the notion of magic wavelength. We then describe the operation of an actual lattice clock using Sr atoms and developed at LNE-SYRTE. Its present accuracy is 2.6 a <... 10(-15).