Professor Kleppner and his group will pursue three major goals: (1) to interpret the laser spectroscopy of Rydberg atoms in magnetic fields in terms of classical chaos and to trace the relationship between the classical and quantal description of the electron motion, (2) determine the ground-state Lamb shift by making the world's most precise measurement of the Rydberg constant, using millimeter wave spectroscopy, (3) perform a precision measurement of the 1S-2S transition in hydrogen where the width of the line due to kinetic motion of the atoms has been vastly reduced by evaporatively cooling the sample.
