Related papers: Hyperfine quenching of the metastable $^3P_{0,2}$ …
Over a two-year duration, we have compared the frequency of the 199Hg+ 5d106s 2S 1/2 (F=0)<-> 5d9 6s2 2D 5/2 (F=2) electric-quadrupole transition at 282 nm with the frequency of the ground-state hyperfine splitting in neutral 133Cs. These…
A different technique is used to study the radiative decay of a metastable state in multiply ionized atoms. With use of a unitary Penning trap to selectively capture Kr$^{17+}$ ions from an ion source at NIST, the decay of the 3d…
The frequency comb created by a femtosecond mode-locked laser and a microstructured fiber is used to phase coherently measure the frequencies of both the Hg^+ and Ca optical standards with respect to the SI second as realized at NIST. We…
Cold samples of calcium atoms are prepared in the metastable $^{3}$P$_{1}$ state inside an optical cavity resonant with the narrow band (375 Hz) $^{1}$S$_{0} \rightarrow ^{3}$P$_{1}$ intercombination line at 657 nm. We observe superradiant…
Iridium ions near $4f$-$5s$ level crossings are the leading candidates for a new type of atomic clocks with a high projected accuracy and a very high sensitivity to the temporal variation of the fine structure constant $\alpha$. To identify…
We have investigated the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates of sodium atoms in the upper hyperfine ground state in a purely optical trap. Condensates in the high-field seeking $| F=2, m_F=-2>$ state were created from initially prepared…
We have produced and detected molecules using a p-wave Feshbach resonance between 40K atoms. We have measured the binding energy and lifetime for these molecules and we find that the binding energy scales approximately linearly with…
Alkaline-earth (AE) atoms have metastable clock states with minute-long optical lifetimes, high-spin nuclei, and SU($N$)-symmetric interactions that uniquely position them for advancing atomic clocks, quantum information processing, and…
We have measured hyperfine structure in the first-excited $P$ state ($D$ lines) of all the naturally-occurring alkali atoms. We use high-resolution laser spectroscopy to resolve hyperfine transitions, and measure intervals by locking the…
We study the $^1$S$_0 - ^3$D$_2$ and $^1$S$_0 - ^3$D$_3$ transitions in Cu II and the $^1$S$_0 - ^3$P$^{\rm o}_2$ transition in Yb III as possible candidates for the optical clock transitions. A recently developed version of the…
Doppler-free saturated absorption spectroscopy is performed on an enriched radioactive Ar-39 sample. The spectrum of the 3s^2 3p^5 4s [3/2]_2 - 3s^2 3p^5 4p [5/2]_3 cycling transition at 811.8 nm is recorded, and its isotope shift between…
Rare-earth ions in dielectric crystals are interesting candidates for storing quantum states of photons. A limiting factor on the optical density and thus the conversion efficiency is the distortion introduced in the crystal by doping…
We evaluate the feasibility of using magnetic-dipole (M1) transitions in highly-charged ions as a basis of an optical atomic clockwork of exceptional accuracy. We consider a range of possibilities, including M1 transitions between clock…
We report on spectroscopic results on the $^2S_{1/2} \rightarrow\,^2P_{3/2}$ transition in single trapped Yb$^+$ ions. We measure the isotope shifts for all stable Yb$^+$ isotopes except $^{173}$Yb$^+$, as well as the hyperfine splitting of…
We demonstrate that several metastable excited states in Hf$~$II, Hf$~$IV and W$~$VI ions may be good clock states since they are sufficiently long-living and are not sensitive to the perturbations. Cooling E1 transitions are available.…
The metastable ^{2}F_{7/2} and ^{2}D_{3/2} states of Yb^{+} are of interest for applications in metrology and quantum information and also act as dark states in laser cooling. These metastable states are commonly repumped to the ground…
This work presents accurate ab initio determination of the hyperfine splitting for the ground state and few low-lying excited states of 113Cd+; important candidates for the frequency standard in the microwave region, using coupled-cluster…
We report on the frequency stabilization of a 739 nm Ti:sapphire laser to a hyperfine component of the $^{127}I_{2}$ B(1)-X(11) P(70) transition using acousto-optic modulation transfer spectroscopy (MTS). A frequency stability of…
Heavy meson pairs produced in the decays of heavy quarkonium resonances at e+ e- machines (beauty and tau-charm factories) have the useful property that the two mesons are in the CP-correlated states. By tagging one of the mesons as a CP…
Magic wavelengths for laser trapping of boson isotopes of alkaline-earth Sr, Ca and Mg atoms are investigated while considering terahertz clock transitions between the $^{3}P_{0}, ^{3}P_{1}, ^{3}P_{2}$ metastable triplet states. Our…