Autobalanced Ramsey Spectroscopy

Abstract

We devise a perturbation-immune version of Ramsey's method of separated oscillatory fields. Spectroscopy of an atomic clock transition without compromising the clock's accuracy is accomplished by actively balancing the spectroscopic responses from phase-congruent Ramsey probe cycles of unequal durations. Our simple and universal approach eliminates a wide variety of interrogation-induced line shifts often encountered in high precision spectroscopy, among them, in particular, light shifts, phase chirps, and transient Zeeman shifts. We experimentally demonstrate autobalanced Ramsey spectroscopy on the light shift prone ^{171}Yb^{+} electric octupole optical clock transition and show that interrogation defects are not turned into clock errors. This opens up frequency accuracy perspectives below the 10^{-18} level for the Yb^{+} system and for other types of optical clocks.