Abstract
We present a liquid-nitrogen-cooled optical clock with an overall systematic uncertainty of . In contrast to the room-temperature optical clock that we have reported previously, the cryogenic black-body radiation (BBR) shield in vacuum is cooled to K using liquid nitrogen. We also implement an ion trap with a reduced heating rate and improved laser cooling. This allows the ion temperature to fall to the Doppler-cooling limit during the clock operation and the systematic uncertainty associated with the secular (thermal) motion of the ion is reduced to . The uncertainty arising from the probe laser light shift and the servo error is also reduced to and 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 is determined with a fractional statistical uncertainty of . The differential BBR shift is used to calculate the static differential polarizability and the result is found to be in excellent agreement with our previous measurement using a different method. This work suggests that the BBR shift of optical clocks can be suppressed well in a liquid-nitrogen environment. Systems similar to what is presented here can also be used to suppress the BBR shift significantly in other types of optical clocks, such as , , , Sr, etc.
- Received 7 April 2021
- Revised 23 December 2021
- Accepted 3 January 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.17.034041
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