Ian Hill

Ian Hill is the lead scientist for the optical lattice clock project in the Optical Frequency Metrology group at NPL. Following his undergraduate study in Physics at Imperial College London, Ian joined NPL as a PhD student working on the development of stabilised lasers and cold atom sources for a Sr optical lattice clock. After graduating with a PhD from Imperial College in 2012, he continued his work at NPL to establish the first operational optical lattice clock in the UK.

Ian’s specialist area of expertise is in optical frequency metrology with optical lattice clocks and related technologies. Ian takes a keen interest in the elegant engineering of complex atomic clock systems with an emphasis on high-performance and low-maintenance operation. Ian has participated in a number of international optical clock comparison campaigns and as such has formed a great affinity for software automation. Ian is also involved in the development of field-deployable ultrastable laser systems based on the NPL cubic cavity.

Areas of interest

• Pushing measurement frontiers with cold atom optical clocks
• Developing optical clocks and optical frequency comparison technology for use in future space-time measurement networks
• Preparation and manipulation of ultracold atoms
• Robust optical clocks for international time scales

Key publications

•  A strontium optical lattice clock with 1 × 10⁻¹⁷ uncertainty and measurement of its absolute frequency
  Richard Hobson, William Bowden, Alvise Vianello, Alissa Silva, Charles F. A. Baynham, Helen S. Margolis, Patrick E. G. Baird, Patrick Gill, and Ian R. Hill,
  Metrologia 57, 065026 (2020)
•  Improving the Q Factor of an Optical Atomic Clock Using Quantum Nondemolition Measuremen
  William Bowden, Alvise Vianello, Ian R. Hill, Marco Schioppo, and Richard Hobson,
  Physical Review X 10, 041052 (2020)
•  Rydberg electrometry for optical lattice clocks
  William Bowden, Richard Hobson, Paul Huillery, Patrick Gill, Matthew P. A. Jones, and Ian R. Hill,Physical Review A 96, 023419 (2017)
•  Dual-axis cubic cavity for drift-compensated multi-wavelength laser stabilisation
  Ian R Hill, Richard J Hendricks, Sean Donnellan, Paul Gaynor, Ben Allen, Geoffrey P Barwood, and Patrick Gill,
  Optics Express 29, Issue 22, 36758 (2021)

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