Increased Atom-Cavity Coupling through Cooling-Induced Atomic Reorganization

The strong coupling of atoms to optical cavities can improve optical lattice clocks as the cavity enables metrologically useful collective atomic entanglement and high-fidelity measurement. To this end, it is necessary to cool the ensemble to suppress motional broadening, and advantageous to maximize and homogenize the atom-cavity coupling. We demonstrate resolved Raman sideband cooling via the cavity as a method that can simultaneously achieve both goals. In 200 ms, we cool 171Yb atoms to an average vibration number <nx> = 0.23(7) in the tightly binding direction, resulting in 93% optical π-pulse fidelity on the clock transition 1S0 -> 3P0. During cooling, the atoms self-organize into locations with maximal atom-cavity-coupling, which will improve quantum metrology applications.