The Hg/Al single-atom, optical clocks: on the path to inaccuracies below 10 -17

Jonas Bergquist

Rinat Tyumenev, Zhen Xu, Lin Yi +3 more

Jérôme Lodewyck

Kangkang Liu, Ru-Chen Zhao, Wei Gou +6 more

Mercury is a promising candidate for the optical lattice clock, due to its low sensitivity to the blackbody radiation. We develop a single folded beam magneto-optical trap for the neutral mercury optical lattice clock, with a 253.7nm frequency quadrupled laser. Up to 1.7 × 10 6 ( 202 Hg) or 1.5 × 10 6 ( 199 Hg) atoms can be captured, and the atom temperature is lowered to 170 μK ( 202 Hg) or 50 μK ( 199 Hg). The cold atom signals of all six rich abundant isotopes are observed in this system.

Vitalii D Ovsiannikov, Vitalii G Pal'chikov, Hidetoshi Katori

The recent progress in designing optical frequency standards with an uncertainty at a level of 10-17-10-18 requires unprecedented accuracy in estimating the role of higher-order uncertainties of optical clocks. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the multipole, nonlinear, anharmonic contributions to uncertainty of the optical-lattice-based clocks of alkaline-earth-like-atoms Sr, Yb and Hg.

Andrew D. Ludlow