Over the past few decades, rapid development of laser cooling techniques and narrow-linewidth lasers have allowed atom-based quantum clocks to achieve unprecedented precision. Techniques originally developed for atomic clocks can be extended to ultracold molecules, with applications ranging from quantum-state-controlled ultracold chemistry to searches for new physics. Because of the richness of molecular structure, quantum metrology based on molecules provides possibilities for testing physics that is beyond the scope of traditional atomic clocks.
This thesis presents the work performed to establish a state-of-the-art quantum clock based on ultracold molecules. The molecular clock is based on a frequency difference between two vibrational levels in the electronic ground state of 88Sr2 diatomic molecules. Such a clock allows us test molecular QED, improve constraints on nanometer-scale gravity, and
potentially provide a model-independent test of temporal variations of the proton-electron
mass ratio. Trap-insensitive spectroscopy is crucial for extending coherent molecule-light interactions and achieving a high quality factor Q. We have demonstrated a magic wavelength technique for molecules by manipulating the optical lattice frequency near narrow polarizability resonances. This general technique allows us to increase the coherence time to tens of ms, an improvement of a factor of several thousand, and to narrow the linewidth of a 25 THz vibrational transition initially to 30 Hz. This width corresponds to the quality factor
Q = 8 × 10^11.
Besides the molecular quantum metrology, investigations of novel phenomena in state-selected photodissociation are also described in this thesis, including magnetic-field control of
photodissociation and observation of the crossover from ultracold to quasiclassical chemistry.
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Prospects of a thousand-ion Sn2+ Coulomb-crystal clock with sub-10^(−19) inaccuracy
We propose a many-ion optical atomic clock based on three-dimensional Coulomb crystals of order one thousand Sn2+ ions confined in a linear RF Paul trap. Sn2+ has a unique combination of features that is not available in previously considered ions: a 1S0 ↔ 3P0 clock transition between two states with zero electronic and nuclear angular momentum (I = J = F = 0) making it immune to nonscalar perturbations, a negative differential polarizability making it possible to operate the trap in a manner such that the two dominant shifts for three-dimensional ion crystals cancel each other, and a laser-accessible transition suitable for direct laser cooling and state readout. We present analytical calculations of the differential polarizability and other relevant atomic properties, as well as numerical calculations of the motion of ions in large Coulomb crystals, to estimate the achievable accuracy and precision of Sn2+ Coulomb-crystal clocks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2016244
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10340291
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ArXivorg
- ISSN:
- 2331-8422
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.15484
