Proposal for a multi-ion optical clock with hundreds of ions
Abstract
Scaling trapped-ion optical clocks to hundreds of ions remains a major challenge due to inhomogeneous frequency shifts in large ion crystals. Here, we propose a circular surface-trap architecture for a multi-ion optical clock with hundreds of ions. The rotational symmetry of the ion crystal suppresses the main sources of inhomogeneity, quadrupole shift.We investigate the feasibility of a clock based on a ring crystal of 400 40Ca+ ions and propose a suitable experimental setup configuration. We have shown that circular configuration of ions leads to suppression by two orders of magnitude of the quadrupole shift comparing to the linear trap. Combined with stray-field compensation and dynamical decoupling techniques, this architecture provides a pathway toward multi-ion optical clocks with fractional frequency uncertainty at the 10−18 level and an expected 20-fold improvement in frequency stability compared to single ion clocks.
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BibTeX
@misc{kamenskikh2026proposal,
title = {{Proposal for a multi-ion optical clock with hundreds of ions}},
author = {Pavel Kamenskikh and Vasiliy Smirnov and Ilya Gerasin and Ilya Semerikov and Wei Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.15609},
eprint = {2610.15609},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15609},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Proposal for a multi-ion optical clock with hundreds of ions
AU - Pavel Kamenskikh
AU - Vasiliy Smirnov
AU - Ilya Gerasin
AU - Ilya Semerikov
AU - Wei Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/11
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.15609
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15609
AB - Scaling trapped-ion optical clocks to hundreds of ions remains a major challenge due to inhomogeneous frequency shifts in large ion crystals. Here, we propose a circular surface-trap architecture for a multi-ion optical clock with hundreds of ions. The rotational symmetry of the ion crystal suppresses the main sources of inhomogeneity, quadrupole shift.We investigate the feasibility of a clock based on a ring crystal of 400 ^40Ca^+ ions and propose a suitable experimental setup configuration. We have shown that circular configuration of ions leads to suppression by two orders of magnitude of the quadrupole shift comparing to the linear trap. Combined with stray-field compensation and dynamical decoupling techniques, this architecture provides a pathway toward multi-ion optical clocks with fractional frequency uncertainty at the 10^−18 level and an expected 20-fold improvement in frequency stability compared to single ion clocks.
ER -