Suppression of Collisional Shifts in a Strongly Interacting Lattice Clock

Optical lattice clocks with extremely stable frequency are possible when many atoms are interrogated simultaneously, but this precision may come at the cost of systematic inaccuracy resulting from atomic interactions. Density-dependent frequency shifts can occur even in a clock that uses fermionic atoms if they are subject to inhomogeneous optical excitation. However, sufficiently strong interactions can suppress collisional shifts in lattice sites containing more than one atom. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach with a strontium lattice clock by reducing both the collisional frequency shift and its uncertainty to the level of 10(-17). This result eliminates the compromise between precision and accuracy in a many-particle system; both will continue to improve as the number of particles increases.