REMPD Spectroscopy of ThF+ and A Modular Delayed Self-Heterodyne Interferometer

Boyce, Kevin

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

REMPD Spectroscopy of ThF+ and A Modular Delayed Self-Heterodyne Interferometer Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/fj2362645

Abstract

The JILA eEDM project currently seeks to improve its sensitivity to the electron’s permanent electric dipole moment, a quantity of fundamental importance to new extensions to the Standard Model, using tabletop experimental techniques familiar to atomic, molecular, and optical physics. The current generation of the experiment uses HfF⁺ polarized molecular ions trapped in a rotating electric bias field to measure the Stark shift on a particular pair of hyperfine states due to this permanent dipole moment. However, a future generation of the experiment hopes to perform the measurement in a different species, ThF⁺, due to its intrinsically stronger interatomic electric field and naturally longer coherence times of the state in which the measurement is performed. Though ThF⁺ offers these improvements to the sensitivity using the same measurement technique which has already been demonstrated in HfF⁺, it offers challenges in that the energetic spacing of its various electronic and vibrational states is largely unknown. Without this information, the necessary quantum state preparation and readout for performing the measurement, involving the use of many separate, specialized laser sources, cannot be performed. In this thesis, two projects are presented towards realizing this process, an analysis of 1750cm^-1 of REMPD survey spectroscopy in the range of 307.5-325nm and the construction of a fully modular delayed self-heterodyne interferometer to be used as a diagnostic tool in monitoring the linewidths of a cw laser system.

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