Improvement of Stability of ~(40)Ca~+ Optical Clock with State Preparation

Stability is one of most important performances of an atomic clock. Here we describe our recent work on improving the stability of our 40 Ca+ optical clock. State preparation is adopted to transfer the ion to the groundstate magnetic sublevel of the clock transition, after the quenching laser transfers the ion to the ground state at each cycle. Using this method,the stability for ~(40)Ca~+ optical clock is improved to about 6.3 × 10~(-15)/τ~(1/2).Compared with 1.0 × 10~(-14)/τ~(1/2) in previous work, the averaging time is decreased to reach a given level of statistical uncertainty in a clock comparison.     

Relationship measurement between ac-Stark shift of ~(40)Ca~+ clock transition and laser polarization direction

Ac-Stark shift of atom levels is caused by an ac-electromagnetic field. As an electromagnetic wave, laser light does induce ac-Stark shift. It is proved experimentally that if the light is linearly polarized, the dynamic polarizability changes with polarization direction. The polarization direction of the linearly-polarized laser is tuned by 720?, and the ac-Stark shifts of the 4S_(1/2),m=±1/2→3D_(5/2,m=±1/2) clock transitions in ~(40)Ca~+ are measured in steps of 10?. The frequency shifts change with laser polarization in a periodical manner and have values opposite to each other.