Direct Extraction of Nuclear Structure Information Using Precision Lithium-Ion Spectroscopy
Abstract
Accurately describing nuclear interactions within atomic nuclei remains a challenge, which hinders our exploration of new physics beyond the Standard Model. However, these nuclear interactions can be characterized by nuclear parameters such as the Zemach radius and the electric quadrupole moment, which are reflected in atomic spectra. Our work has achieved high-precision measurements of lithium ion hyperfine splittings at the level of ~kHz, and directly extracted these important nuclear structure parameters. We observed significant discrepancies between our results and both nuclear theory and molecular spectra regarding the electric quadrupole moment. The result for Li deviated by from the currently recommended value, whereas the result for Li deviated by up to from the recommended value determined by molecular spectroscopy. These discrepancies motivated us to conduct independent calculations based on nuclear structure theory, which provided support for the results obtained from ion spectroscopy. Our results provide valuable information for characterizing nuclear forces, serve as sensitive benchmarks for testing nuclear structure theories, and enable critical comparisons with both electron-nuclear scattering and molecular spectroscopy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.06384,
title = {Direct Extraction of Nuclear Structure Information Using Precision Lithium-Ion Spectroscopy},
author = {Hua Guan and Xiao-Qiu Qi and Jian-Guo Li and Peng-Peng Zhou and Wei Sun and Shao-Long Chen and Xu-Rui Chang and Yao Huang and Pei-Pei Zhang and Zong-Chao Yan and G. W. F. Drake and Ai-Xi Chen and Zhen-Xiang Zhong and Jia-Li Wang and Nicolas Michel and Ting-Yun Shi and Ke-Lin Gao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.06384},
year = {2025}
}