Prospects for measuring the electron's electric dipole moment with polyatomic molecules in an optical lattice

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel experiment using laser-coolable BaOH molecules in an optical lattice to measure the electron's electric dipole moment with unprecedented precision, leveraging long coherence times.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual design for an eEDM measurement with BaOH molecules in an optical lattice, highlighting potential sensitivity improvements and addressing key limitations.

Findings

Potential statistical error of 10^{-30} e·cm

Long coherence times achievable with optical lattice

Measurement over 120 days with 5×10^9 molecules

Abstract

We present the conceptual design of an experiment to measure the electron's electric dipole moment (eEDM) using $^{138}$BaOH molecules in an optical lattice. The BaOH molecule is laser-coolable and highly sensitive to the eEDM, making it an attractive candidate for such a precision measurement, and capturing it in an optical lattice offers potentially very long coherence times. We study possibilities and limitations of this approach, identify the most crucial limiting factors and ways to overcome them. The proposed apparatus can reach a statistical error of $10^{-30}\,e\,$cm by measuring spin precession on a total number of $5 \times 10^9$ molecules over a span of 120 days.