Engineering topics

Breier, A. A.

Publications and source records attributed to Breier, A. A..

3 records

DOE OSTI2024

Precision spectroscopy and laser-cooling scheme of a radium-containing molecule

Molecules containing heavy radioactive nuclei are predicted to be extremely sensitive to violations of the fundamental symmetries of nature. The nuclear octupole deformation of certain radium isotopes massively boosts the sensitivity of radium monofluoride molecules to symmetry-violating nuclear properties. Moreover, these molecules are predicted to be laser coolable. In this article, we report measurements of the rovibronic structure of radium monofluoride molecules, which allow the determination of their laser cooling scheme. We demonstrate an improvement in resolution of more than two orders of magnitude compared to the state of the art. Our developments allowed measurements of minuscule amounts of hot molecules, with only a few hundred per second produced in a particular rotational state. The combined precision and sensitivity achieved in this work offer opportunities for studies of radioactive molecules of interest in fundamental physics, chemistry and astrophysics.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2021

Isotope Shifts of Radium Monofluoride Molecules

Isotope shifts of 223–226,228 Ra 19 F were measured for different vibrational levels in the electronic transition A 2 II 1/2 ←X 2 Σ + . The observed isotope shifts demonstrate the particularly high sensitivity of radium monofluoride to nuclear size effects, offering a stringent test of models describing the electronic density within the radium nucleus. Ab initio quantum chemical calculations are in excellent agreement with experimental observations. These results highlight some of the unique opportunities that short-lived molecules could offer in nuclear structure and in fundamental symmetry studies.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2021

Ab initio study and assignment of electronic states in molecular RaCl

Radium compounds have attracted recently considerable attention due to both development of experimental techniques for high-precision laser spectroscopy of molecules with short-lived nuclei and amenability of certain radium compounds for direct cooling with lasers. Currently, radium monofluoride (RaF) is one of the most studied molecules among the radium compounds, both theoretically and recently also experimentally. Complementary studies of further diatomic radium derivatives are highly desired to assess the influence of chemical substitution on diverse molecular parameters, especially on those connected with laser cooling, such as vibronic transition probabilities, and those related to violations of fundamental symmetries. Here in this article high-precision ab initio studies of electronic and vibronic levels of diatomic radium monochloride (RaCl) are presented. Recently developed approaches for treating electronic correlation with Fock-space coupled cluster methods are applied for this purpose. Theoretical results are compared to an early experimental investigation by Lagerqvist and used to partially reassign the experimentally observed transitions and molecular electronic levels of RaCl. Effective constants of $\mathscr{P}$-odd hyperfine interaction W a and $\mathscr{P, T}$-odd scalar-pseudoscalar nucleus-electron interaction Ws in the ground electronic state of RaCl are estimated within the framework of a quasirelativistic Zeroth-Order Regular Approximation approach and compared to parameters in RaF and RaOH.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗