Cancio Pastor P, Consolino L, Giusfredi G, De Natale P, Inguscio M, Yerokhin VA, Pachucki K. Frequency metrology of helium around 1083 nm and determination of the nuclear charge radius.
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2012;
108:143001. [PMID:
22540790 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.108.143001]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/17/2011] [Revised: 02/29/2012] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
We measure the absolute frequency of seven out of the nine allowed transitions between the 2 (3)S and 2 (3)P hyperfine manifolds in a metastable (3)He beam by using an optical frequency comb synthesizer-assisted spectrometer. The relative uncertainty of our measurements ranges from 1×10(-11) to 5×10(-12), which is, to our knowledge, the most precise result for any optical ^{3}He transition to date. The resulting 2 (3)P-2 (3)S centroid frequency is 276,702,827,204.8(2.4) kHz. Comparing this value with the known result for the (4)He centroid and performing ab initio QED calculations of the (4)He-(3)He isotope shift, we extract the difference of the squared nuclear charge radii δr(2) of (3)He and (4)He. Our result for δr(2)=1.074(3) fm(2) disagrees by about 4σ with the recent determination [R. van Rooij et al., Science 333, 196 (2011)].
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