Auto-Balanced Ramsey Spectroscopy

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 auto-balanced 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.