Highly-charged ions as a basis of optical atomic clockwork of exceptional accuracy

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new type of atomic clock using highly charged ions with forbidden transitions, potentially achieving accuracy comparable to nuclear clocks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel class of atomic clocks based on highly charged ions and evaluates their systematic effects for high precision.

Findings

Highly charged ions can host laser-accessible forbidden transitions.

These transitions enable the development of extremely accurate atomic clocks.

The proposed clocks may rival nuclear clocks in precision.

Abstract

We propose a novel class of atomic clocks based on highly charged ions. We consider highly-forbidden laser-accessible transitions within the $4f^{12}$ ground-state configurations of highly charged ions. Our evaluation of systematic effects demonstrates that these transitions may be used for building exceptionally accurate atomic clocks which may compete in accuracy with recently proposed nuclear clock.