Optical Ion Clock with Engineered Immunity to Motion-Induced Frequency Shifts
Abstract
Spectroscopic frequency shifts due to residual motion of the probed atoms significantly contribute to the uncertainty budgets of state-of-the-art optical ion clocks. For clock transitions with second-order Doppler and quadratic Stark shifts of opposite signs, it is possible to configure electrodynamic ion confinement such that these two shift effects become anticorrelated causing zero net shift. Here, we introduce a spectroscopic interrogation protocol which leads, for systems with unknown and varying motional energy gain rates, to first-order auto-suppression of corresponding frequency shifts without requiring the opposite-sign configuration. We experimentally demonstrate the proposed method on a new ytterbium ion optical clock probing the 467 nm electric octupole (E3) transition, where the combined fractional uncertainty contribution from motion-induced frequency shifts is reduced from 1.3×10−18 to 0.3×10−18. An interleaved optical frequency ratio measurement against ytterbium's electric quadrupole transition (E2) at 435 nm delivers an E3/E2 frequency ratio of 0.932 829 404 530 965 340 (39). Combined with previously published ratio data this leads to a limit for a potential fractional temporal variation of the fine-structure constant of 2.4 (2.7) × 10−19/yr, in agreement with existing bounds.
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BibTeX
@misc{lide2026optical,
title = {{Optical Ion Clock with Engineered Immunity to Motion-Induced Frequency Shifts}},
author = {Mark Lide and Wesley Hardin and Christian Sanner},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.26775},
eprint = {2609.26775},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26775},
note = {CC0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Optical Ion Clock with Engineered Immunity to Motion-Induced Frequency Shifts
AU - Mark Lide
AU - Wesley Hardin
AU - Christian Sanner
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.26775
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26775
AB - Spectroscopic frequency shifts due to residual motion of the probed atoms significantly contribute to the uncertainty budgets of state-of-the-art optical ion clocks. For clock transitions with second-order Doppler and quadratic Stark shifts of opposite signs, it is possible to configure electrodynamic ion confinement such that these two shift effects become anticorrelated causing zero net shift. Here, we introduce a spectroscopic interrogation protocol which leads, for systems with unknown and varying motional energy gain rates, to first-order auto-suppression of corresponding frequency shifts without requiring the opposite-sign configuration. We experimentally demonstrate the proposed method on a new ytterbium ion optical clock probing the 467 nm electric octupole (E3) transition, where the combined fractional uncertainty contribution from motion-induced frequency shifts is reduced from 1.3×10^−18 to 0.3×10^−18. An interleaved optical frequency ratio measurement against ytterbium's electric quadrupole transition (E2) at 435 nm delivers an E3/E2 frequency ratio of 0.932 829 404 530 965 340 (39). Combined with previously published ratio data this leads to a limit for a potential fractional temporal variation of the fine-structure constant of 2.4 (2.7) × 10^−19/yr, in agreement with existing bounds.
ER -