An Optical Clock Based on a Single Trapped 199Hg+ Ion
By Scott A. Diddams, T. Udem, J. Bergquist, E. A. Curtis, R. Drullinger, Leo Hollberg, W. Itano, William David Lee, C. Oates, K. Vogel and 1 more. Science, 2001
654 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microwave atomic clocks have been the de facto standards for precision time and frequency metrology over the past 50 years, finding widespread use in basic scientific studies, communications, and navigation. However, with its higher operating frequency, an atomic clock based on an optical transition can be much more stable. We demonstrate an all-optical atomic clock referenced to the 1.064-petahertz transition of a single trapped199Hg+ ion. A clockwork based on a mode-locked femtosecond laser provides output pulses at a 1-gigahertz rate that are phase-coherently locked to the optical frequency. By comparison to a laser-cooled calcium optical standard, an upper limit for the fractional frequency instability of 7 × 10−15 is measured in 1 second of averaging—a value substantially better than that of the world's best microwave atomic clocks.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee1abc7adc549f25263d7c54a699bd8ad3fe0deb
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Rainer Blatt
- Christopher R. Monroe
- Jun Ye
- John Kitching
- Steven T. Cundiff
- David J. Wineland
- Svenja Knappe
- M. Krelina
Citations in the corpus
- Quantum dynamics of single trapped ions (2003, background): “…traditional work in ion traps [see, for example, Brown and Gabrielse (1986); Paul (1990); Gosh (1995)], those on ion-trap-based frequency standards (Diddams et al., 2001, and references therein), and those that concentrate on quantum information processing (Steane, 1997; Wineland et al., 1998),…”
- Atomic Sensors – A Review (2011, background): “Optical frequency references typically involve far fewer atoms than microwave frequency references; ion-based optical [7], for example, often use a single laser-cooled ion probed over an interaction time of 1 s.”
- Quantum technology for military applications (2021, background): “Trapped ions are one of the most universal sensing platforms [100, 101, 102].”