Short-Lived Radioactive Molecules
Precision measurements of molecular systems provide highly sensitive laboratories for exploring the possible violation of fundamental symmetries and search for new physics beyond the standard model physics [Barr14,Demi17,Safr18]. Radioactive molecules compound of heavy and deformed short-lived isotopes are predicted to offer unprecedented sensitivity to investigate parity and time reversal violation effects. However, the experimental knowledge of short-lived radioactive molecules is scarce, and quantum chemistry calculations has constituted the only source of spectroscopy information.
[Barr14] Barry, J. et al. Nature 512, 286 (2014).
[Demi17] DeMille et al. Science 357, 990 (2017).
[Safr18] Safronova et al. Rev Mod Phys 90, 025008 (2018).
Shedding Light on the Nuclear Many-Body Problem
The fundamental understanding of the nuclear many-body problem plays a central role in describing the universe. It is an essential bridge which connects our knowledge of the fundamental forces of nature with the emergence of macroscopic phenomena, from the very origin of the elements in the universe to the formation of astrophysical objects.
The atomic nucleus exhibits exceptional characteristics that illustrate the beauty and intrigue of strongly correlated quantum systems. The formation of shell-structures, the clustering of nucleons, and the emergence of collective phenomena are just a few stunning examples that exemplify the richness and uniqueness of the nuclear many-body problem. How do these distinct nuclear phenomena emerge from the microscopic interactions of their fundamental constituents? How does this connect with the underlying theory of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD)? And how do the properties of nuclei impact our understanding of nuclear matter far from equilibrium? These are some of the major questions that motivate current theoretical and experimental nuclear physics research [1-4]. In order to provide direct answers to these questions, our group is focused on the development of highly sensitive and precise laser spectroscopy techniques for the study of nuclei at the extreme of stability [5-10]. By performing isotope shift and hyperfine structure measurements, fundamental properties of the atomic nucleus such as spins, electromagnetic moments, and charge radii, can be obtained [11]. As nuclei far away from stability do not occur naturally and only live for a fraction of a second, they have to be produced artificially and studied at specialized facilities such as FRIB (US), TRIUMF (Canada), RIKEN (Japan) and ISOLDE, CERN (Switzerland).
Observables such as the nuclear charge radius have shown to be particularly sensitive to the details of the nuclear force [5, 12,13]. Remarkably, the charge radii of finite nuclei can also provide direct constraints to the properties of nuclear matter such as the radii of neutron stars and parameters of the equation of state [13,14]. While complementary observables such as nuclear electromagnetic moments have been shown to be important to understand the role of electro-weak processes in nuclei [15,16].
Do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in this project.
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[5] Garcia Ruiz et al. Nature Physics 12, 594 (2016).
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[9] Flanagan et al. Physical Review Letters 111, 212501 (2013).
[10] Yang et al. Physical Review Letters 116, 182502 (2016).
[11] Campbell et al. Prog Part Nucl Phys 86, 127 (2016).
[12] Lonardoni et al. Phys Rev Lett 120, 122502 (2018).
[13] Hagen et al. Nature Physics 12, 186 (2016).
[14] Brown, Phys Rev Lett 119, 122502 (2017).
[15] Pastore et al. Phys Rev C 87, 035503 (2013).
[16] Carlson et al. Rev Mod Phys 87, 1067 (2015).