Towards Using a 2D Magneto-Optical Trap to Improve a Mercury Optical Lattice Clock

We report on the recent improvements of the mercury optical lattice clock based on
¹⁹⁹
Hg operating at LNESYRTE. In particular we describe how the exploitation of a 2D Magneto Optical Trap (2D-MOT) allowed us to increase significantly the number of useful atoms gathered in a given time. As a consequence we were able to decrease the loading time of the mercury optical lattice clock, so as the cycle time, that is the main factor of the Dick effect.