Baolin Zhang

We report a single-ion optical clock based on the 4S_1/2-3D_5/2 transition of the 40Ca+ ion, operated in a liquid nitrogen cryogenic environment,achieving a total systematic uncertainty of 4.4E-19. We employ a refined temperature evaluation scheme to reduce the frequency uncertainty due to blackbody radiation (BBR), and the 3D sideband cooling has been implemented to minimize the second-order Doppler shift. We have precisely determined the average Zeeman coefficient of the 40Ca+ clock transition to be 14.345(40) Hz/mT^2, thereby significantly reducing the quadratic Zeeman shift uncertainty. Moreover, the cryogenic environment enables the lowest reported heating rate due to ambient electric field noise in trapped-ion optical clocks.

For the first time, we experimentally determine the infrared magic wavelength for the $^{40}$Ca$^{+}$ $4s\, ^{2}\!S_{1/2} \rightarrow 3d\,^{2}\!D_{5/2}$ electric quadrupole transition by observation of the light shift canceling in $^{40}$Ca$^{+}$ optical clock. A "magic" magnetic field direction is chosen to make the magic wavelength insensitive to both the linear polarization purity and the polarization direction of the laser. The determined magic wavelength for this transition is 1056.37(9)~nm, which is not only in good agreement with theoretical predictions but also more precise by a factor of about 300. Using this measured magic wavelength we also derive the differential static polarizability to be $-44.32(32)$~a.u., which will be an important input for the evaluation of the blackbody radiation shift at room temperatures. Our work paves a way for all-optical-trapping of $^{40}$Ca$^{+}$ optical clock.

Here we present a liquid nitrogen-cooled Ca^+ optical clock with an overall systematic uncertainty of 3*10^-18. In contrast with the room-temperature Ca^+ optical clock that we have reported previously, the temperature of the blackbody radiation (BBR) shield in vacuum has been reduced to 82(5) K using liquid nitrogen. An ion trap with a lower heating rate and improved cooling lasers were also introduced. This allows cooling the ion temperature to the Doppler cooling limit during the clock operation, and the systematic uncertainty due to the ion's secular (thermal) motion is reduced to < 1*10^-18. The uncertainty due to the probe laser light shift and the servo error are also reduced to < 1*10^-19 and 4*10^-19 with the hyper-Ramsey method and the higher-order servo algorithm, respectively. By comparing the output frequency of the cryogenic clock to that of a room-temperature clock, the differential BBR shift between the two was measured with a fractional statistical uncertainty of 7*10^-18. The differential BBR shift was used to calculate the static differential polarizability, and it was found in excellent agreement with our previous measurement with a different method. This work suggests that the BBR shift of optical clocks can be well suppressed in a liquid nitrogen environment. This is advantageous because conventional liquid-helium cryogenic systems for optical clocks are more expensive and complicated. Moreover, the proposed system can be used to suppress the BBR shift significantly in other types of optical clocks such as Yb^+, Sr^+, Yb, Sr, etc.