Atomic Physics Seminars

The “tune out” wavelength of an atomic species corresponds to the frequency of applied light for which the (frequency dependent) AC electric polarizability is vanishing. Precise measurements of these “tune out” wavelengths provides valuable knowledge of a species’ transition dipole matrix elements which broadly speaking are important for a number of experimental and theoretical applications. This includes providing a pathway for improvements in species specific optical trapping and aiding atomic parity violation measurements which can be used to place valuable constraints on the standard model through the weak mixing angle. Notably, the AC Stark shift includes scalar, vector and tensor components of the polarizability so care has to be taken to isolate the contribution of interest when performing measurements of the tune out wavelength. In this talk I will discuss our recent experimental developments towards a more precise measurement of the Rubidium 87 vector tune out wavelength lying between the D1 and D2 atomic lines for atoms in the F = 2 hyperfine ground state using an atom wave interferometer. These efforts build on our group’s previous work measuring the scalar portion of the polarizability and aim to improve upon preceding attempts at extracting the vector tune out wavelength.