Published July 19, 2024 | Published
Journal Article Open

Electroweak Nuclear Properties from Single Molecular Ions in a Penning Trap

  • 1. ROR icon Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon TRIUMF
  • 3. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics
  • 4. ROR icon University of Groningen
  • 5. ROR icon University of Chicago
  • 6. ROR icon Argonne National Laboratory
  • 7. ROR icon Duke University
  • 8. ROR icon Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  • 9. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 10. ROR icon Comenius University
  • 11. Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA

Abstract

We present a novel technique to probe electroweak nuclear properties by measuring parity violation (PV) in single molecular ions in a Penning trap. The trap’s strong magnetic field Zeeman shifts opposite-parity rotational and hyperfine molecular states into near degeneracy. The weak interaction-induced mixing between these degenerate states can be larger than in atoms by more than 12 orders of magnitude, thereby vastly amplifying PV effects. The single molecule sensitivity would be suitable for applications to nuclei across the nuclear chart, including rare and unstable nuclei.

Copyright and License

© 2024 American Physical Society.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science (OS), and Office of Nuclear Physics under Awards No. DE-SC0021176 and No. DE-SC0021179. This research is partly based on work supported by Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) funding from Argonne National Laboratory, provided by the OS Director of the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. We thank the Center for Information Technology of the University of Groningen for its support and access to the Peregrine high-performance computing cluster. The INCITE program awarded computer time. This research also used resources from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE-OS User Facility supported under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. We also acknowledge the support from High Sector Fock space coupled cluster method: benchmark accuracy across the periodic table (with Project No. VI.Vidi.192.088 of the research program Vidi, financed by the Dutch Research Council) and the 2020 Incite Award: “PRECISE: Predictive Electronic Structure Modeling of Heavy Elements.” J. K. acknowledges the support of a Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. S. B. M. acknowledges the support of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF Grant No. 2141064) and a Fannie and John Hertz Graduate Fellowship. The work of A. B. was supported by the project “High Sector Fock space coupled cluster method: benchmark accuracy across the periodic table” with Project No. Vi.Vidi.192.088 of the research program Vidis, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). L. F. P. acknowledges the support from NWO Project No. VI.C.212.016 of the talent program VICI, and the support from the Slovak Research and Development Agency (Projects No. APVV-20-0098, No. APVV-20-0127). All sensitivity factor calculations were performed using an adapted version of the Dirac program package. Simulations used numpy, scipy, pandas, and simion. Figures were produced using matplotlib.

Supplemental Material

The Supplemental Material includes details on treating a certain type of uncertainty and the derivative of an analytic expression. Both are not essential to the understanding of the manuscript, however, they might be of interest to readers from our particular subfield.

Supplement (PDF)

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Additional details

Created:
December 4, 2024
Modified:
December 4, 2024