Intrinsic Electric Dipole Moments of Paramagnetic Atoms: Rubidium and Cesium

TL;DR

This paper calculates the intrinsic electric dipole moments of rubidium and cesium atoms, highlighting their potential for high-precision experiments to detect fundamental electron properties.

Contribution

It provides the first relativistic coupled-cluster calculations of EDM enhancement factors for Rb and Cs ground states, crucial for interpreting experimental limits on the electron EDM.

Findings

Calculated EDM enhancement factors for Rb and Cs

Emphasized importance of precise theoretical values for experiments

Supported high-precision atomic experiments to constrain electron EDM

Abstract

The electric dipole moment (EDM) of paramagnetic atoms is sensitive to the intrinsic EDM contribution from that of its constituent electrons and a scalar--pseudo-scalar (S-PS) electron-nucleus interactions. The electron EDM and the S-PS EDM contribution to atomic EDM scales as Z^3. Thus, the heavy paramagnetic atomic systems will exhibit large enhancement factors. However, the nature of the coupling is so small that it becomes an interest of high precision atomic experiments. In this work, we have computed the EDM enhancement factors of the ground states of Rb and Cs due to both the electron EDM and the S-PS EDM using the relativistic coupled-cluster (RCC) theory. The importance of obtaining the precise enhancement factors and the experimental results in deducing a reliable limit on the electron EDM is emphasized.