Prospects for optical clocks combining high sensitivity to new physics with insensitivity to perturbations: The case of Sb+, Au+ , and Hg2+

Abstract

Our study is motivated by the prospect of several metastable states in the Sb$ ^{+} $, Au$ ^{+} $, and Hg$ ^{2+} $ ions being used as possible candidates for optical clocks. We calculate several atomic properties relevant to the development of optical clocks for those clock transitions using two different approaches of relativistic many-body calculations, configuration interaction with single-double coupled-cluster (CI+SD) method, and configuration interaction with perturbation theory (CIPT) method. Our results demonstrate that the relative black body radiation shifts for these transitions are small, $ \sim 10 ^{-16} $. It is also found that there is considerable sensitivity to new physics, as evidenced by a significant enhancement of the effect of the time variation of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ on the frequencies of the clock transitions. The corresponding factor ranges from -5.56 to 2.20. Our results are compared with available previous data.