Abstract
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.
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