CM-AMO SEMINAR | Toward Single Molecular-Ion Spectroscopy

Precision of the best molecular spectroscopy is currently orders of
magnitude behind atomic ion spectroscopy, owing primarily to
challenges in molecular state preparation and readout.  Applications
of improved molecular spectroscopy would include searches for
time-variation of fundamental constants, parity violation studies, and
searches for fundamental electric dipole moments. Our group at
Northwestern University is developing the necessary tools to perform
clock-quality spectroscopy on single trapped molecular ions. We are
currently working with species having semi-closed electronic cycling
transitions, so that optical pumping into the rotational ground state
can be achieved by pulse-shaping of a resonant femtosecond laser.  I
will also describe a simple readout technique we are developing to map
the internal molecular state onto a co-trapped atomic ion, using a
pulsed radiation pressure force to excite secular motion.