Frequency stability of optical lattice clocks

In this paper, we review several aspects of the frequency stability of optical lattice clocks. We describe a new ultra-stable cavity design with reduced thermal noise and record frequency stability (below 10(-15)), as well as a non-destructive detection scheme for measuring the clock transition probability. Given the experimental parameters we measured, we simulate different sequence strategies for optimizing the stability. Finally, we report on the development of a second optical lattice clock and simulate several comparison strategies. In particular, we show by a numerical method that a stability as low as 2 x 10(-16)tau(-1/2) can be reached with optical lattice clocks, and we show how to demonstrate this stability with a double clock system.