Mercury-199 Trapped Ion Frequency Standard. Recent Theoretical Progress and Experimental Results,

Abstract

The 40.5 GHz hyperfine resonance of 199 Hg ions stored in an rf quadrupole trap has shown to have a very small fractional linewidth, suggesting its use as a high-precision frequency standard. The most significant offset in such a standard would be the second-order Doppler shift resulting from the motion of the stored ions. We have recently analyzed the situation in which the secular motion is cooled to a temperature of about 300 K by the presence of a light background gas at low pressure, resulting in an ion cloud whose density is almost completely determined by the balance of pseudopotential and space-charge forces. Under these circumstances we have found that the second-order Doppler shift can be calculated accurately from the trapping parameters, the temperature, and the total number and mass of the stored ions.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1983
Accession Number
ADP002449

Entities

People

  • L. S. Cutler
  • M. D. Mcguire
  • R. P. Giffard

Organizations

  • Hp

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Doppler Effect
  • Frequency
  • Frequency Standards
  • Pennsylvania
  • Precision
  • Resonance
  • Space Charge
  • Standards

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Approximation Theory.
  • Materials Science and Engineering.
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster
  • Space - Orbital Debris