Combined atomic clock with blackbody-radiation-shift-induced instability below 10^-19under natural environment conditions

authored by

V. I. Yudin, A. V. Taichenachev, M. Yu Basalaev, O. N. Prudnikov, H. A. Fürst, T. E. Mehlstaubler, S. N. Bagayev

Abstract

We develop a method of synthetic frequency generation to construct an atomic clock with blackbody radiation (BBR) shift uncertainties below 10-19 at environmental conditions with a very low level of temperature control. The proposed method can be implemented for atoms and ions, which have two different clock transitions with frequencies ν1 and ν2 allowing to form a synthetic reference frequency νsyn = (ν1 - ϵν2)/(1 - ϵ), which is absent in the spectrum of the involved atoms or ions. Calibration coefficient ϵ can be chosen such that the temperature dependence of the BBR shift for the synthetic frequency νsyn has a local extremum at an arbitrary operating temperature T0. This leads to a weak sensitivity of BBR shift with respect to the temperature variations near operating temperature T0. As a specific example, the Yb+ ion is studied in detail, where the utilized optical clock transitions are of electric quadrupole (S → D) and octupole (S → F) type. In this case, temperature variations of ±7 K lead to BBR shift uncertainties of less than 10-19, showing the possibility to construct ultra-precise combined atomic clocks (including portable ones) without the use of cryogenic techniques.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Quantum Optics
QuantumFrontiers

External Organisation(s)

Novosibirsk State University
RAS - Institute of Laser Physics
Novosibirsk State Technical University
National Metrology Institute of Germany (PTB)

Type

Article

Journal

New journal of physics

Volume

23

ISSN

1367-2630

Publication date

18.02.2021

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Physics and Astronomy(all)

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/abe160 (Access: Open)