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Physical Review Letters

Spontaneous Emission Lifetime of a Single Trapped Ca+ Ion in a High Finesse Cavity

Axel Kreuter, Christoph Becher, Gavin P. T. Lancaster, A.B. Mundt, Carlos Russo, Hartmut Häffner, Christian F. Roos, Jürgen Eschner, Ferdinand Schmidt‐Kaler, R. Blatt

Published May 19, 2004• 72 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the spontaneous emission lifetime of a single trapped (40)Ca+ ion placed at different positions in the vacuum standing wave inside a high finesse cavity which is stabilized to the atomic transition. The lifetime is measured by quantum state detection after pi-pulse excitation. The result for the natural lifetime of the D(5/2) metastable state of 1161(22) ms agrees, within 1 standard deviation, with the most precise published value. We observe a reduction of the spontaneous emission lifetime of approximately 15% in the node of the vacuum field.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.92.203002

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We investigate the spontaneous emission lifetime of a single trapped (40)Ca+ ion placed at different positions in the vacuum standing wave inside a high finesse cavity which is stabilized to the atomic transition. The lifetime is measured by quantum state detection after pi-pulse excitation. The result for the natural lifetime of the D(5/2) metastable state of 1161(22) ms agrees, within 1 standard deviation, with the most precise published value. We observe a reduction of the spontaneous emission lifetime of approximately 15% in the node of the vacuum field.
We report measurements of the lifetimes of the 3d2D5∕23d\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}^{2}D_{5∕2}3d2D5∕2​ and 3d2D3∕23d\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}^{2}D_{3∕2}3d2D3∕2​ metastable states of a single laser-cooled 40Ca+^{40}\mathrm{Ca}^{+}40Ca+ ion in a linear Paul trap. We introduce a measurement technique based on high-efficiency quantum state detection after coherent excitation to the D5∕2{D}_{5∕2}D5∕2​ state or incoherent shelving in the D3∕2{D}_{3∕2}D3∕2​ state, and subsequent free, unperturbed spontaneous decay. The result for the natural lifetime of the D5∕2{D}_{5∕2}D5∕2​ state of 1168(9) ms agrees excellently with the most precise published value. The lifetime of the D3∕2{D}_{3∕2}D3∕2​ state is measured with a single ion and yields 1176(11) ms which improves the statistical uncertainty of previous results by a factor of four. We compare these experimental lifetimes to high-precision ab initio all order calculations [D3∕2{D}_{3∕2}D3∕2​ state: 1196(11) ms; D5∕2{D}_{5∕2}D5∕2​ state: 1165(11) ms] and find a very good agreement. These calculations represent an excellent test of high-precision atomic theory and will serve as a benchmark for the study of parity nonconservation in Ba+{\mathrm{Ba}}^{+}Ba+ which has similar atomic structure.
Abstract We present for the first time a direct measurement of the lifetime ratio between the 3 d 2 D 3 / 2 and 3 d 2 D 5 / 2 metastable states in a single trapped 40 Ca + . A high-efficiency quantum state detection technique is adopted to monitor the quantum jumps, and a high precision and synchronized measurement sequence is used for laser control to study the rule of spontaneous decay. Our method shows that the lifetime ratio is a constant and is irrelevant to the dwell time; it is only determined by the spontaneous decay probabilities of the two metastable states at one random decay time, independent of the lifetimes of the two metastable states. Systematic errors such as collisions with background gases, heating effects, impurity components, the shelving and pumping rates and the photon counts are analyzed, and the lifetime ratio between the 3 d 2 D 3 / 2 and 3 d 2 D 5 / 2 states is directly measured to be 1.0257(43) with an uncertainty of 0.42%. Our result is in good agreement with the most precise many-body atomic structure calculations. Our method can be used to obtain the lifetime of a state which is usually difficult to measure and can be used to determine the magnetic dipole transition matrix elements in heavy ions such as Ba + and Ra + , and can also be universally applied to lifetime ratio measurements of other single atoms and ions with a similar structure.