A Timing Sequence Control System Of Aluminum Ion Optical Frequency Standard

Aluminum ion optical frequency standards use aluminum ion’s transition atoptical wavelength as frequency standard, and transform the optical frequency intomicrowave frequency using frequency comb to provide high precision and stability offrequency standards. Benefiting from many advantages of aluminum ion transition,aluminum ion optical frequency standard have the smallest systematic error in alloptical frequency standards at present. In order to promote the development of opticalfrequency standards and meet the needs of our country, our group is in the process ofdeveloping an aluminum ion optical frequency standard.The developement of aluminum ion optical frequency standards involve the useof automatic timing control system inevitably. This paper describles the design andimplementation of the timing control system which meets the experimentrequirements and services aluminum ion optical frequency standard. First of all, Idesigne the timing control system for producing, trapping and cooling24Mg+ionsthrough the integration of PC-DAQ and GPIB that is based on LabVIEW andPCIe-6351. Through the setup of hardware platform and the design of LabVIEWsoftware, finally I succeed in producing, trapping and cooling24Mg+ions.Then, I designe two sets of sequential control systems which are based onLabVIEW and FPGA board and used for antenna experiment and clock transitionsignal detection experiments. The main demand of the two experiments on the timingcontrol system was generating the TTL timing pulse sequence which wascharacterized by finite period, multi-channel, strict synchronization, low rising time,high stability, adjustable pulse-width and millisecond or microsecond pulse width sothat the controlled device in each channel can respond to the corresponding timingsequence accordingly, so a pulse sequence generator was designed via digital I/Omethod and timer/counter method individually based on LabVIEW and PCIe-6351.Although it is able to generate the pulse, due to the disadvantages of the abovemethod, as well as the FPGA board’s excellent performance and powerful function, Ifinally choose to develop the timing measurement and control system based onLabVIEW and PCIe-7851R. In order to configure the FPGA function of PCIe-7851R board, I successfully develope the master and slave program by graphicalprogramming using the LabVIEW FPGA module. The experiment’s results show thatthe timing pulse sequencer satisfy the experimental requirement.