Tue March 31, 2026 4:00 pm
CUA Seminar: David Hume – Quantum-limited measurements with the Al+ optical clocks at NIST
Location:MIT 4-270
The Ion Storage Group at NIST has developed several generations of optical atomic clocks based on quantum logic spectroscopy of the 1S0–3P0 transition in 27Al+. The latest version of this system began operation last year and achieves higher stability, longer continuous run times and lower systematic uncertainty than previous versions. In this talk I will review the quantum-logic clock effort at NIST and introduce the newest system, which reaches an systematic uncertainty of 5.5×10-19 and an instability averaging as 3.5×10-16/(τ /s)^(1/2). Further improvement to this instability could be achieved by using differential measurement techniques and by scaling the system to multiple clock ions, including the possibility of measurements with entangled states.