SSP2012 - 5th International Symposium on Symmetries in Subatomic Physics

Optical transitions can occur in some highly charged ions (HCIs) when the ion stage and nuclear charge are tuned such that orbitals with different principal quantum number and angular momentum are nearly degenerate. In these cases the transition energy may be within laser range even though the ionisation energy is large (of order several hundred eV). We have identified several such systems and...

The constraint on a possible time-variation of physical constants set by an experiment depends both on the accuracy of the measurement and on the sensitivity of the system the measurement is performed on. Here, we present a laboratory experiment using a system with a highly enhanced sensitivity to a possible time-variation of the proton-to-electron-mass ratio, μ. Due to an incidental...

A single trapped ion opens a promising path for a measurement of atomic parity violation (APV). Since the sensitivity of the APV grows stronger than the third power of the atomic number Z, a single Ra ion is an excellent candidate for APV experiments, enabling a precise measurement of the electroweak mixing angle in the Standard Model of particle physics. Online laser spectroscopy of ...

The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts that the effect of weak interactions in the nuclei of molecules results in parity violating observables. Parity violation has already been seen in atomic systems but not in molecules. We are currently building a setup that can detect parity violation in heavy diatomic molecules. Using a traveling-wave Stark decelerator we will decelerate and trap...

on behalf of the UCN Project Team August 2011 marked the official startup of regular beam operation of the ultracold neutron (UCN) source at the Paul Scherrer Institute. Switzerland. The design goal is to exceed the currently available UCN densities by a factor 50 to 100 and to use these neutrons for fundamental physics experiments, most prominently the search for a neutron electric...