Combined microwave and optical spectroscopy for hyperfine structure analysis in thulium atoms

TL;DR

This paper uses combined microwave and optical spectroscopy on ultracold thulium atoms to significantly improve the precision of hyperfine splitting measurements, which are crucial for quantum technologies.

Contribution

It provides highly accurate hyperfine splitting frequencies for thulium's ground and clock states, refining previous measurements by several orders of magnitude.

Findings

Hyperfine splitting frequency of ground state refined to 1,496,550,658.23(3) Hz.

Hyperfine splitting frequency of clock state refined to 2,113,946,873.08(9) Hz.

Landé g-factor of the clock level refined to 0.85479(11).

Abstract

The hyperfine structure of atoms and ions is widely used in fundamental and applied research. Accurate knowledge of hyperfine splitting values is essential for quantum metrology applications as well as for improving the performance of systems designed for quantum computing and simulation. We present refined values of the hyperfine splitting frequencies of the ground and clock states of thulium atom, $f_{g}^\textrm{HFS}=1\,496\,550\,658.23(3)$\,Hz and $f_{c}^\textrm{HFS}=2\,113\,946\,873.08(9)$\,Hz, respectively. The measurements are performed on an ultracold atomic ensemble in an optical lattice using combined microwave and optical transition spectroscopy. Our results improve the accuracy by 2 and 7 orders of magnitude for $f_{g}^\textrm{HFS}$ and $f_{c}^\textrm{HFS}$, respectively, compared to the previously published values. We also refine the value of the Land\'e g-factor of the clock level to $g_c = 0.85479(11)$.