Performance of 3 cm3 ion trap vacuum package sealed for 10 years

Abstract

Miniature atomic clocks based on the interrogation of the ground state hyperfine splitting of buffer gas cooled ions confined in radio frequency Paul traps have shown great promise as high precision prototype clocks. We report on the performance of two miniature ion trap vacuum packages after being sealed for as much as 10 years. We find the lifetime of the ions within the trap has increased over time for both traps and can be as long as 50 days. We form two clocks using the two traps and compare their relative frequency instability one with another to demonstrate a short-term instability of 5×10−13τ−1/2 integrating down to 1×10−14 after 2 ks of integration. The trapped ion lifetime and clock instability demonstrated by these miniature devices despite only being passively pumped for many years represents a critical advance toward their proliferation in the clock community.