Precision Spectroscopy of Polarized Molecules in an Ion Trap

Abstract

Toward a New Physics The search for physics beyond the Standard Model is carried out at accelerator facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider but also on a smaller scale in atomic and molecular physics experiments. One of the signatures of this “new physics” would be a nonvanishing electric dipole moment of the electron, but experiments designed to look for it need to distinguish between the signal and many potential artifacts. Loh et al. (p. 1220 ) introduce a method based on the spectroscopy of polarized molecular ions that avoids some of the sources of systematic error.