Abstract
We report the first operation of a optical clock, a promising high-performance clock candidate. The clock uses a single trapped ion and operates on the electric quadrupole transition. By self-referencing three pairs of symmetric Zeeman transitions, we demonstrate a frequency instability of , where is the averaging time in seconds. The total systematic uncertainty is evaluated to be . Using the clock, we realize the first measurement of the ratio of the state to the state Landé -factors: . A optical clock could improve limits on the time variation of the fine structure constant, , in an optical frequency comparison. The ion also has several features that make it a suitable system for a transportable optical clock.
- Received 6 October 2021
- Accepted 15 December 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.033202
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