Electric field noise is a major contributor to the motional heating of trapped ions, resulting in frequency shifts and significant frequency uncertainties in precision spectroscopy, as well as decoherence in quantum simulation. This  becomes even more relevant when extending the systems to 2D or 3D...

We investigate the temperature dependence of the low-frequency vibrational spectrum of an ion Coulomb crystal near the linear to zigzag transition. For zero temperature, the linear to zigzag transition is a second-order phase transition that exhibits, amongst other things, a soft mode, which is a...

Bloomberg Quickshot released a new video about time dilation and clocks on Youtube featuring interviews with Don Lincoln (Fermi Lab), David Hume (NIST) and Tanja Mehlstäubler (PTB/LUH). Very cool!   

You can find the video here.

In ongoing collaboration with physicists from Novosibirsk, we demonstrated a scheme to reduce the instability of the blackbody-radiation (BBR) shift in optical clocks to below 10⁻¹⁹. To achieve this, one has to combine at least two clock transitions with different BBR shift sensitivities to form a...

We report on the PTB chip ion traps which we developed for the multi-ion clock and the Coulomb crystals.

You can find the full paper here.

The Scilight article about the paper is available here. 

Elizaveta Surzhikova receives her bachelor's degree. We congratulate her on this achievement!

The title of her thesis is

Autonome Steuerung einer optischen Atomuhr mit Zustandserkennung und -korrektur.

We demonstrated for the first time coherent excitation of the octupole transition near 467nm in a single 172Yb+ ion, which is a core requirement for a scalable test of Local Lorentz invariance using the electronic F-state manifold.  The large degree of control over the magnetic environment and laser...

We have the pleasure to have Simon Ragg from the group of Prof. Jonathan Home (ETH Zürich) as our guest!
He will give a talk on Thursday, 08/10/2020 on “Design and fabrication of a segmented ion trap optimised for cavity QED in the strong coupling regime”
The talk will take place at 15:15 in the...

Chen Hu successfully finishes his "Studienarbeit". We congratulate him on this achievement!

The title of his thesis is

Design and Set-up of an optical system for an optical multi-ion clock

Topological defects in low-dimensional nonlinear systems feature a sliding-to-pinning transition of relevance for a variety of scenarios, ranging from biophysics to nano- and solid-state physics. We find that the dynamics after a local excitation results in a highly nontrivial energy transport in...