Garchinger Maier-Leibnitz-Kolloquium: Towards a quantum logic clock for highly-charged heavy ions

by Prof. Peter Micke (Helmholtz Institute Jena, GSI Darmstadt, Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

Thursday 5 Jun 2025, 16:15 → 17:15 Europe/Berlin

Lecture hall, ground floor (west) (LMU building, Am Coulombwall 1, campus Garching)

Highly-charged heavy ions are excellent probes to explore the frontiers of our knowledge in atomic, nuclear, and fundamental physics for two reasons: First, they feature physics at the most extreme electromagnetic fields we have access to in a laboratory. Second, they offer forbidden optical transitions in  their hyperfine structure to measure related, highly-enhanced effects with exceptional accuracy. This is possible in an optical clock experiment where the measurements are expected to be limited by the ultimate resolution due to the natural linewidth of the clock transition itself, typically of the order of 1 Hz. Until now, however, heavy ions in their highest charged states were inaccessible for this type of precision experiment. In this talk I will review the advances that have been made in recent years to overcome essentially all obstacles and report on a new quantum logic clock experiment that we are setting up downstream the heavy-ion accelerator of GSI. The combination of quantum logic spectroscopy as a universal and highly accurate spectroscopy method with the capabilities of ion production using the accelerator chain is unique. It opens the door to frequency-metrology with highly-charged heavy ions, which is not limited to atomic transitions, for unrivaled tests of the Standard Model of particle physics and searches for unknown physics beyond the Standard Model.

Hybrid access via ZOOM:
https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/j/98457332925?pwd=TWc3V1JkSHpyOTBPQVlMelhuNnZ1dz09
Meeting ID: 984 5733 2925
Passcode: 979953

kolloquium-05-06-25.pdf