Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

High-Accuracy Measurement of Atomic Polarizability in an Optical Lattice Clock

Published

Author(s)

Jeffrey A. Sherman, Nathan D. Lemke, Nathan M. Hinkley, M. Pizzocaro, Richard W. Fox, Andrew D. Ludlow, Christopher W. Oates

Abstract

Presently, the Stark effect contributes the largest source of uncertainty in a ytterbium optical atomic clock through blackbody radiation. By employing an ultracold, trapped atomic ensemble and high stability optical clock, we characterize the quadratic Stark effect with unprecedented precision. We report the ytterbium optical clock's sensitivity to electric fields (such as blackbody radiation) as the differential static polarizability of the ground and excited clock levels: 36.2612(7) kHz (kV/cm)^-2 The clock's fractional uncertainty due to room temperature blackbody radiation is reduced an order of magnitude to 3e-17.
Citation
Physical Review Letters
Volume
108

Keywords

Atomic measurements, blackbody radiation, clocks, electric fields, precision measurements, polarizability, Stark effect

Citation

Sherman, J. , Lemke, N. , Hinkley, N. , Pizzocaro, M. , Fox, R. , Ludlow, A. and Oates, C. (2012), High-Accuracy Measurement of Atomic Polarizability in an Optical Lattice Clock, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910796 (Accessed March 19, 2024)
Created April 13, 2012, Updated February 19, 2017