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Ultrastable and ultra-accurate clock transitions in open-shell highly charged ions

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Lyu,  Chunhai       
Division Prof. Dr. Christoph H. Keitel, MPI for Nuclear Physics, Max Planck Society;

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Keitel,  Christoph H.       
Division Prof. Dr. Christoph H. Keitel, MPI for Nuclear Physics, Max Planck Society;

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Harman,  Zoltán
Division Prof. Dr. Christoph H. Keitel, MPI for Nuclear Physics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Lyu, C., Keitel, C. H., & Harman, Z. (2025). Ultrastable and ultra-accurate clock transitions in open-shell highly charged ions. Communications Physics, 8: 3. doi:10.1038/s42005-024-01901-5.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0010-84D0-D
Abstract
Highly charged ions (HCIs) are less sensitive to external perturbations and are therefore attractive for the development of ultrastable clocks. However, only a few HCI candidates are known to provide optical clock transitions. In this work, we discover a large family of HCI clocks, with more than 100 suitable optical clock transitions hidden in the fine-structure terms of open-shell ions over 70 elements. Their projected instabilities and accuracies are and στ ~ 10-17 / √τ and σν/ν < 10−20, respectively, surpassing state-of-the-art optical clocks by several orders of magnitude. This indicates that having a high-performance optical clock transition is not a property of particular elements, but a virtue host by most elements from the periodic table. Furthermore, at given configurations, the clock transitions in heavy ions scale up to the XUV and soft-x-ray region, and thus enable the development of ultrastable clocks based on shorter wavelengths. The existence of multiple clock transitions in different charge states of a single element, as well as in a whole isoelectronic sequence would significantly enrich the search for new physics and the test of nuclear theories via high-precision spectroscopy.