Investigating ground-state fine-structure properties to explore suitability of boronlike S11+- K14+ and galliumlike Nb10+-Ru13+ ions as possible atomic clocks

Abstract

We study various properties of the 2pP1/22-2pP3/22 fine-structure splittings in the boronlike S11+, Cl12+, Ar13+, and K14+ ions and the 4pP1/22-4pP3/22 fine-structure splittings in the galliumlike Nb10+, Mo11+, Tc12+, and Ru13+ ions to find out the feasibility of using these highly charged ions as suitable optical atomic clocks. The roles of the electron correlations due to the Dirac-Coulomb-Breit Hamiltonian and accounting for lower-order quantum electrodynamics effects are shown explicitly in the calculations of electron affinities, excitation energies, transition-matrix elements, lifetimes, hyperfine-structure constants, and electric quadrupole moments of the states involved with clock transitions using a relativistic couple-cluster method. We also estimate the most commonly appearing systematic effects in the atomic clock experiments due to the electric quadrupole, the second-order Zeeman, both the dc and ac Stark, and the black-body radiation shifts in the aforementioned fine-structure splittings to demonstrate typical orders of magnitude of fractional frequency shifts.