Final project meeting

On wednesday 27.10.2021, the CC4C consortium held its final project meeting (online), discussing results from the past months and preparing the final reporting. After completion of the reports and their acceptance by MSU the publishable summary is now available for download here and the project has now formally closed.
Please check the list of publications for reports on our results. We are looking forward to future joint work on optical clocks with trapped ions in other contexts, like in the EMPIR project TSCAC.

Novel movements for optical clocks and sensors

International online workshop on 20 to 22 Sep 2021

EU funded EMPIR projects USOQS and CC4C joined forces again for a workshop close to the completion of the projects to present their work set in context with international research in this free workshop held over three days. 11 presentations by project-internal and external speakers from the quantum metrology, precision measurement and quantum information areas will be given.

More information in the announcement and in the schedule and abstracts.

Registration is now open.

New method for the coherent suppression of tensor frequency shifts

The PTB team has developed and implemented a scheme to coherently suppress tensor frequency shifts that may arise from the interaction between ions in Coulomb crystals. The magnitude of these shifts depends on the orientation of the ion's quantization axis  relative to the external perturbation. The method applies the continuous rotation of an external magnetic field during the free atomic state evolution in a Ramsey excitation. It retrieves the unperturbed frequency within a single interrogation cycle and is readily applicable to various atomic clock systems. 

The work is published in Physical Review Letters.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.143201

Measurement of the Th-229 Isomer Energy with a Magnetic Microcalorimeter

TU Wien together with partners from Heidelberg University, Mainz University and Helmholtz Institute Mainz present a precision measurement of the energy of the low-lying isomeric state in Th-229 based on the spectrum of gamma radiation produced in the alpha decay of U-233 using a dedicated cryogenic magnetic microcalorimeter. The evaluation determines the Th-229 isomer energy to be 8.10(17) eV, superseding in precision previous values based on gamma spectroscopy, and agreeing with a recent measurement based on internal conversion electrons. 

The work is published in Physical Review Letters.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.142503

Electronic Bridge Excitation in Highly Charged Th-229 Ions

The MPIK team together with cooperation partners from Columbia University, USA, the Univ. of New South Wales, Australia, and LMU Munich, Germany, has published a proposal and theoretical investigation of the excitation of the 8-eV Th-229 isomer through the electronic bridge mechanism in highly charged ions. By exploiting the rich level scheme of open 4f orbitals and the robustness of highly charged ions against photoionization, a pulsed high-intensity optical laser can be used to efficiently drive the nuclear transition by coupling it to the electronic shell.

The work is published in Physical Review Letters.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.192502 

Online Workshop on next-generation quantum clocks

5 - 8 October 2020

New perspectives are now on the horizon to realize the next generation of quantum clocks: collective behavior of atoms and ions, spin squeezing, entanglement, superradiance, nuclear transitions, application of quantum logic and other tricks can be exploited to further improve quantum clocks both in term of stability and accuracy. The EU funded projects Quantera Q-Clocks, USOCS and CC4C are organizing an online workshop hosted by ICFO.
With 8 tutorial lectures given by world leading scientists, the workshop will be a great opportunity to learn about these new techniques and their application in the field of time and frequency metrology.
Students already involved in this field of research are warmly invited to present a poster about their most recent results.  

Register at: http://s.ic.fo/WorkshopNext-generationQuantumClocksOct2020

Workshop program

 

New Publications:

Three papers from the project consortium have been published in the AIP journal Review of Scientific Instruments:
The INRIM team is reporting its radiofrequency drive based on interdependent resonant circuits for precise control of ion traps, https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5063305 and a scalable hardware and software control apparatus for experiments with hybrid quantum systems, https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5049120

The MPIK/LUH/PTB coooperation has published on its cryogenic radio-frequency ion trap for quantum logic spectroscopy of highly charged ions, https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5100594

The MPIK group has also made available three master's theses defended at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg on the development of cryogenic RF traps and laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions (see publications)

International summer schools on metrology:

Optical clocks with trapped ions will be a topic at several summer schools, with lectures given by CC4C
coordinator E. Peik:

European Frequency and Time Seminar EFTS 2019
1-5 July 2019, Besancon, France
http://efts.eu/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=current:00_start

International School of Physics "Enrico Fermi"
COURSE 206 - NEW FRONTIERS FOR METROLOGY: FROM BIOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY TO QUANTUM AND DATA SCIENCE
4-13 July 2019, Varenna, Italy
https://www.sif.it/corsi/scuola_fermi/mmxix/206

Les Houches predoc school on Interaction of Light and Cold Atoms
30 September - 11 October 2019, Les Houches, France
https://coldatoms2019.sciencesconf.org/

 

Project Meeting in Vienna

The project meeting in Vienna will take place after 9 months project duration. The consortium will meet at BEV-PTP and TU Wien ATI from 2019, February 13 - 14.

Kick-Off

Kick-Off meeting of the CC4C Consortium from 20 to 21 June

Project start

Official Start of CC4C on May 1, 2018