This grant supports the acquisition of a laser system at Smith College, an undergraduate women's liberal arts college. This system will enable two main developments, the first of which is the next generation of a technique called "Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA)" which is expected to significantly improve the ability of the U.S. to monitor activity at known and suspected nuclear reprocessing sites, as well as to analyze ice core samples for climate history studies. The second development involves the measurement of several energy levels of neutral beryllium to high precision, which improves our understanding of atomic theory and helps to advance basic science.
To perform trace analysis with krypton (in support of the first development described in the paragraph above), krypton atoms first need to be transferred to a metastable state for laser cooling and trapping. The precision of most Atom Trap Trace Analysis measurements is currently limited by the methods used to produce the metastable atomic beams. Replacing these methods with the optical source funded here will lead to significant advances such as an increase in detection efficiency, a decrease in sample size, and elimination of cross-sample contamination. The beryllium project (the second development described in the paragraph above) aims to improve experimental measurements on several energy levels and the ionization threshold. Currently, theoretical estimates of the energy levels have more than an order of magnitude more precision than experimental measurements. These improved experimental results will delineate various theoretical models, test quantum electrodynamics, and help determine the nuclear charge radius of beryllium.
