Measurement of the electron's electric dipole moment using YbF molecules: methods and data analysis

By Dhiren M. Kara, I. Smallman, J. Hudson, B. Sauer, M. Tarbutt, E. Hinds. 2012

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We recently reported a new measurement of the electron's electric dipole moment using YbF molecules (Hudson et al 2011 Nature 473 493). Here, we give a more detailed description of the methods used to make this measurement, along with a fuller analysis of the data. We show how our methods isolate the electric dipole moment from imperfections in the experiment that might mimic it. We describe the systematic errors that we discovered, and the small corrections that we made to account for these. By making a set of additional measurements with greatly exaggerated experimental imperfections, we find upper bounds on possible uncorrected systematic errors which we use to determine the systematic uncertainty in the measurement. We also calculate the size of some systematic effects that have been important in previous electric dipole moment measurements, such as the motional magnetic field effect and the geometric phase, and show them to be negligibly small in the present experiment. Our result is consistent with an electric dipole moment of zero, so we provide upper bounds to its size at various confidence levels. Finally, we review the prospects for future improvements in the precision of the experiment.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c4606fa1ddc8919b58252df399efc5f63dbf5d0

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Citations in the corpus

Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in physics, chemistry, and beyond (2016, background): “Progress until 2012 had reduced the upper limit of de to about 10−27 e cm (Hudson et al., 2011; Kara et al., 2012; Regan et al., 2002).”
Measuring the electric dipole moment of the electron in BaF (2018, background): “ uncertainties. The measurement principle and the interaction zone are similar to that of the ongoing molecular EDM experiments such as ACME at Harvard [46] and the YbF experiment at Imperial College [47]. The systematic eects are thus comparable; however, they need to be evaluated explicitly in the”
Order of Magnitude Smaller Limit on the Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron (2013, background): “, d e= ( 2:1 3:7 stat 2:5 syst) 10 29 ecm,(4) comes from d e= 15,22~!NE=E e using E e = 84 GV/cm and !NE=(2:6 4:8 stat 3:2 syst) mrad/s. This sets a 90 percent condence limit, jd ej<8:7 10 29 ecm,(5) that is 12 times smaller than the previous best limit1,4. Because paramagnetic molecules are sens”
Effective Lagrangian for a light Higgs-like scalar (2013, background): “In the lepton sector, the current measurements and SM predictions of the muon [43, 44] and electron [45, 46] anomalous magnetic moments and the limits on their EDMs [47–49] imply the following 95% probability bounds:”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, background): “As an example, we consider a state of the thorium oxide molecule, ThO, that is mentioned in Sec.”