Atomic Clocks with Suppressed Blackbody Radiation Shift

Abstract

We develop a concept of atomic clocks where the blackbody radiation shift and its fluctuations can be suppressed by 1-3 orders of magnitude independent of the environmental temperature. The suppression is based on the fact that in a system with two accessible clock transitions (with frequencies ν1 and ν2) which are exposed to the same thermal environment, there exists a "synthetic" frequency ν(syn) ∝ (ν1 - ε12ν2) largely immune to the blackbody radiation shift. For example, in the case of 171Yb+ it is possible to create a synthetic-frequency-based clock in which the fractional blackbody radiation shift can be suppressed to the level of 10(-18) in a broad interval near room temperature (300±15 K). We also propose a realization of our method with the use of an optical frequency comb generator stabilized to both frequencies ν1 and ν2, where the frequency ν(syn) is generated as one of the components of the comb spectrum.