Highly charged ions (HCIs) combine compact electronic structure with strong relativistic effects, offering both robustness against external perturbations and enhanced sensitivity to variations of the fine-structure constant. Recent advances in sympathetic cooling and trapping enable precision measurements of highly charged ions; however, fully exploiting their potential requires accurate theoretical predictions. In particular, reliable calculations of clock wavelengths are essential for experimentally locating HCI clock transitions. Here, we treat ${\mathrm{Cf}}^{17+}$ as a univalent ion and perform calculations within the relativistic coupled-cluster framework, iteratively including nonlinear single-double contributions and valence and core triple excitations. We also assess quantum-electrodynamic corrections and basis-set and partial-wave truncation effects. Our results establish the impact of different correlation contributions on the low-lying energy spectrum and provide a quantitatively reliable prediction of the $5f_{5/2}\to 6p_{1/2}$ clock transition, highlighting the critical role of core-valence correlations and iterative triples for precision spectroscopy and optical clock development.

Close

PrevNext

View figure in article

• Atomic & molecular structure
• Electron correlation calculations for atoms & ions