ATOMIC PARITY VIOLATION in HEAVY ALKALIS: Detection by Stimulated Emission for Cesium and Traps for Cold Francium Stefano Sanguinetti
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ATOMIC PARITY VIOLATION IN HEAVY ALKALIS: Detection by Stimulated Emission for Cesium and Traps for Cold Francium Stefano Sanguinetti To cite this version: Stefano Sanguinetti. ATOMIC PARITY VIOLATION IN HEAVY ALKALIS: Detection by Stimu- lated Emission for Cesium and Traps for Cold Francium. Atomic Physics [physics.atom-ph]. Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris VI, 2004. English. tel-00006785 HAL Id: tel-00006785 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00006785 Submitted on 31 Aug 2004 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. ATOMIC PARITY VIOLATION IN HEAVY ALKALIS: Detection by Stimulated Emission for Cesium and Traps for Cold Francium Ú×ÓÖ× ËØÒÓ ËÒÙ Ò ØØ Ä ÓÖØÓ Ö Ã×ØÐÖ ÖÓ×× Ð ÈÖÓº Ⱥ ÂÕÙ Ö ÔÖØ ÑÒØÓ × º ÖÑ ÈÖÓº Ⱥ Å ÒÙÞÞ È Ø× × Ò ÈÝ× ×¸ ¾¼¼# ATOMIC PARITY VIOLATION IN HEAVY ALKALIS: Detection by Stimulated Emission for Cesium and Traps for Cold Francium ËØÒÓ ËÒÙ Ò ØØ Ú×ÓÖ× Ä ÓÖØÓ Ö Ã×ØÐÖ ÖÓ×× Ð ÈÖÓº Ⱥ ÂÕÙ Ö ÔÖØ ÑÒØÓ × º ÖÑ ÈÖÓº Ⱥ Å ÒÙÞÞ È Ø× × Ò ÈÝ× ×¸ ¾¼¼# Universit´e Pierre et Marie Curie, Ecole Doctorale de Physique de la r´egion parisienne ED 107 Universit`a di Pisa, Scuola di Dottorato Galileo Galilei, XVI ciclo This Ph D thesis was carried out in France (LKB) and in Italy (Dipartimento di Fisica E. Fermi), under a double-badged (‘cotutelle’) program between the Universit´e Pierre et Marie Curie and the Universit`a di Pisa. From Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll (1872): illustration by John Tenniel. Contents Introduction 1 1 Elements of parity violation theory in atoms 7 1.1Weakinteractionsinatoms....................... 7 1.2Manifestationoftheparityviolatingweakinteraction........ 8 1.3ChoiceofthePVobservable....................... 10 1.3.1 Effectivetransitiondipole.................... 10 1.3.2 Atomic anisotropy after excitation . ............ 10 1.3.3 Detectionofthealignmentbystimulatedemission...... 11 2 Parity violation detection in a cesium cell: strategy and preliminary results 13 2.1Principle.................................. 13 2.1.1 Experimental setup ........................ 13 2.1.2 Detection of the alignment of the cesium atoms by the stimulatedemissionprocess................... 21 2.1.3 Main systematic effects arising from electric and magnetic fields 26 2.2 History and organization of the experimental work . ........ 27 2.2.1 Experimental background .................... 27 2.2.2 Our grooved cells . ........................ 29 2.3 First tests: characterization and optimization of the experimental conditions................................. 31 2.3.1 AlignmentofthePVsetup................... 31 2.3.2 Cellwindows:tiltandtemperature............... 33 2.3.3 Firstexamplesofasymmetry.................. 39 2.3.4 Thetransversefields....................... 42 2.3.5 The measurement of the applied longitudinal electric field . 47 2.3.6 The longitudinal magnetic field Bz(Ez-odd).......... 51 2.4 Improvements of the experimental setup ................ 54 2.4.1 Stabilization of the excitation laser frequency . ........ 54 viii Contents 2.4.2 Reducingtheabsorptionoftheprobebeam.......... 60 2.4.3 Use of a polarization magnifier: the dichroic cube . ...... 66 2.5Parityviolationmeasurementsandanalysis.............. 69 2.5.1 OrganizationofthePVacquisition............... 69 2.5.2 Noisydatarejection....................... 72 2.5.3 Anisotropies............................ 72 2.5.4 Isotropic contribution of γ1 and α2 ............... 77 2.5.5 Measurements with and without the use of the polarization magnifier: considerations about the noise . .......... 80 2.5.6 Conclusion............................ 85 3 The first steps for a parity violation experiment with radioactive francium: production and trapping 87 3.1ConsiderationsforaPVmeasurementwithcoldfrancium...... 88 3.1.1 Coldbeam............................ 88 3.1.2 Prospects for forbidden-transition spectroscopy and parity vi- olation measurements using a beam of cold stable or radioac- tiveatoms............................. 88 3.1.3 Dipoletrap............................ 100 3.2 The present Francium experiment at Legnaro laboratories: from pro- ductiontotrapping............................ 103 3.2.1 Franciumproductionandextraction.............. 105 3.2.2 Thesecondarybeamline.................... 116 3.2.3 The neutralizer .......................... 119 3.2.4 The magneto-optical trap . .................. 123 3.2.5 Conclusion............................ 129 Conclusion 131 A Important quantities for parity violation experiments in cesium and francium 135 A.1Thecaseofcesiumatoms........................ 135 hf A.1.1 M1 deducedfromtheatomictheory............. 135 hf M M1 A.1.2 1: experimental measurement of M1 ............ 136 A.1.3 The vector polarizability β ................... 136 PV A.1.4 m(E1 )............................. 137 A.1.5 kPV fromatomiccalculations.................. 137 A.1.6 The weak charge QW ...................... 138 A.1.7 The electric quadrupole amplitude E2 ............. 139 A.2Thecaseoffranciumatoms....................... 139 A.2.1 The magnetic dipole amplitude M1 ............... 139 A.2.2 The scalar and vector polarizabilities α and β ......... 139 PV A.2.3 m(E1 )............................. 140 A.3 Summary table .............................. 140 Contents ix Acknowledgements 141 List of Figures 143 References 147 Introduction The thesis work presented in this document deals with atomic parity violation in heavy alkalis: cesium and francium. The first proposal for measuring parity violation (PV) in atoms, with laser spectroscopy techniques, dates back to 1974 [1, 2]. The interest for such experiments comes mainly from the subsequent test of fundamental Physics (Standard Model) provided by this kind of measurements, after elaboration of the results with theoretical atomic structure calculations. Precisely, the atomic PV measurements allow to probe the effect of the weak neutral currents on atoms. The weak neutral currents and the associated gauge boson Z0 were predicted by the electro-weak model, in the framework of the Standard Model (SM) (developed mainly around 1960 [3, 4, 5] to 1980 [6, 7, 8]), as a consequence of the gauge invariance: at that time, only the weak charged currents, mediated by the W ± bosons, had been observed, essentially in the nuclear β decays or in leptons decays, and there was a strong motivation to find experimental evidence for the Z0 boson. The observation of the neutral currents was made extremely difficult by the smallness of the associated effects, and by their charge-conserving feature which prevented them to play any role in the typical weak interaction decays (such as the well-known β decay), only governed by charged currents effects. In atomic systems, the opportunity to detect neutral currents effects comes from the associated parity violation, inherent to the weak interaction: parity violation turns out to be a necessary powerful signature to discriminate the effect of the weak neutral currents from the preponderant parity conserving electromagnetic interactions. By now, the weak neutral currents have been experimentally observed in many systems: they have been studied in different processes, like neutrino scattering on + − matter, or even the direct production of the Z0 boson by e e scattering at the LEP collider (CERN). Nevertheless, the interest of atomic parity violation (or APV) did not decrease, because it still allows to probe weak interactions at low energy scales (i.e. at low transferred momentum), providing an important complement to high energy collider searches for physics beyond the Standard Model (see for instance ref. [9] for a recent review about low energy tests of the weak interaction). Alkalis are very interesting systems for APV experiments, because their atomic structure can be calculated with a very high accuracy. Among the alkalis, cesium and francium are the more suited atoms to perform PV measurements, since the effects of the weak interaction are larger for atoms with heavier nuclei. Although Cs and Fr are fundamentally very similar (as they are consecutive al- 2 kalis in the periodic table) the implementation of a spectroscopy experiment has to be quite different for these two elements: Fr has no stable isotopes, therefore it is available only in extremely small quantities from radioactive decays or nuclear reactions, and it is not possible to study it in a simple vapour cell. The first spec- troscopic measurements on Fr atoms, in 1978 [10], took advantage of the CERN ISOLDE facility for the production of unstable nuclei. The experiment was set up in such a way that a francium beam, isotopically separated, interacted at right an- gle with a CW tunable laser. A few years ago, thanks to the new arising trapping techniques, the possibility to spatially confine a sample of cold Fr atoms (with a magneto-optical trap or MOT) led to new high precision measurements of the Fr atomic structure [11]. The MOT allows to reach an atomic density high enough to obtain good signals with laser spectroscopy. Note that trapping techniques can also be applied to cesium atoms, to obtain