PUBLICATION ABSTRACTS, W. van Wijngaarden           1998

Precision Measurements of Polarizabilities [PDF]

Substantial progress has occurred during the last decade to develop improved methods for determining atomic polarizabilities. We review work that has been done on ground states as well as the study of Stark shifts of transitions to excited states that have been made with a precision of parts in 10⁴. Measurements done on alkali atoms have yielded significantly more accurate data than previously available, stringently testing atomic theory.

The lifetimes as well as the scalar and tensor polarizabilities are computed for over 60 low lying S, P and D states of francium using a Coulomb approximation. The result for the 7P_3/2 state lifetime agrees very closely with a recent measurement while the scalar polarizability of the ground state is estimated to be substantially lower than previously predicted. No other lifetime or polarizability determinations were found in the literature. This will facilitate future studies of francium spectroscopy.

A neutral atom trap is proposed consisting of a magnetic field generated by a pair of anti-Helmholtz coils and a fringing electric field of a parallel plate capacitor. The electric field shifts the energy minimum of the trap away from the point where the magnetic field is zero thus preventing atom loss from the trap due to Majorana transitions. This trap offers some advantages over existing traps that are used to study cold atoms.