Selective highly charged ions as the prospective optical clock candidates with quality factors larger than $10^{15}$

TL;DR

This paper identifies specific highly charged ions as promising candidates for ultra-precise optical clocks with exceptional quality factors and simple structures, potentially achieving fractional uncertainties below 10^{-19}.

Contribution

It proposes new highly charged ions with high quality factors and strong optical transitions, and evaluates their suitability for next-generation optical clocks.

Findings

Quality factors larger than 10^{15} for proposed ions.

Projected fractional uncertainties below 10^{-19}.

Strong optical magnetic-dipole (M1) transitions in selected ions.

Abstract

We propose here a few selective highly charged ions (HCIs), namely Ni$^{12+}$ and Cu$^{13+}$, Pd$^{12+}$ and Ag$^{13+}$, that not only promise to be very high accurate optical clocks below $10^{-19}$ uncertainties, but also offer quality factors larger than $10^{15}$ and yet possess simple atomic structures for the experimental set-up. Moreover, these ions have strong optical magnetic-dipole (M1) transitions than the previously proposed HCI clocks. They can be used for the cooling and detection techniques. To demonstrate the projected fractional uncertainties below $10^{-19}$ level, we have estimated the typical orders of magnitudes due to many of the conventional systematics manifested in an atomic clock experiment, such as Zeeman, Stark, black-body radiation, and electric quadrupole shifts, by performing calculations of the relevant atomic properties.