Single-Atom Optical Clock with High Accuracy
- Time and Frequency Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80305 (United States)
For the past 50 years, atomic standards based on the frequency of the cesium ground-state hyperfine transition have been the most accurate time pieces in the world. We now report a comparison between the cesium fountain standard NIST-F1, which has been evaluated with an inaccuracy of about 4x10{sup -16}, and an optical frequency standard based on an ultraviolet transition in a single, laser-cooled mercury ion for which the fractional systematic frequency uncertainty was below 7.2x10{sup -17}. The absolute frequency of the transition was measured versus cesium to be 1 064 721 609 899 144.94 (97) Hz, with a statistically limited total fractional uncertainty of 9.1x10{sup -16}, the most accurate absolute measurement of an optical frequency to date.
- OSTI ID:
- 20860499
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 97, Issue 2; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.020801; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0031-9007
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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