Pr10+ as a candidate for a high-accuracy optical clock for tests of fundamental physics
arXiv:2407.17610 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.110.042823
The authors propose the In-like ion Pr10+ as a high‑accuracy optical clock candidate with strong sensitivity to variations of the fine‑structure constant, and they compute its low‑lying energy levels and hyperfine constants using combined configuration‑interaction and coupled‑cluster methods, benchmarking against recent measurements.
Abstract
We propose In-like Pr10+ as a candidate for the development of a high-accuracy optical clock with high sensitivity to a time variation of the fine-structure constant, (\dot alpha}/alpha, as well as favorable experimental systematics. We calculate its low-lying energy levels by combining the configuration interaction and the coupled cluster method, achieving uncertainties as low as 0.1%, and improving previous work. We benchmark these results by comparing our calculations for the (5s^2 5p 2P_1/2) - (5s^2 5p 2P_3/2) transition in Pr10+ with a dedicated measurement and for Pr9+ with a recent experiment, respectively. In addition, we report calculated hyperfine-structure constants for the clock and logic states in Pr10+.
8 pages, 2 figures