Enhanced sensitivity to variations of fundamental constants in highly charged molecules from analytic perturbation theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytic perturbation method to efficiently compute the sensitivity of molecular transitions to variations in fundamental constants, demonstrating high sensitivity in certain highly charged molecules for probing such variations.

Contribution

The paper presents a new analytic approach for calculating sensitivity coefficients to fundamental constant variations using expectation values, simplifying previous numerical methods.

Findings

High sensitivity of certain highly charged molecules to fundamental constant variations.

Demonstrated applicability to quasi-degenerate vibronic transitions in specific molecules.

Method compatible with standard relativistic electronic structure codes.

Abstract

Quasi-forbidden electronic transitions in atoms and quasi-degenerate vibronic transitions in molecules serve as powerful probes of hypothetical temporal variations of fundamental constants. Computation of the sensitivity of a transition to a variation of the fine-structure constant is conventionally performed by numerical variation of the speed of light in sophisticated electronic structure calculations, and therewith several individual calculations have to be performed. An approach is presented herein that obtains sensitivity coefficients as first order perturbation to the Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian and allows their computation as expectation values of the relativistic kinetic energy and rest-mass operators. These are available in essentially all \emph{ab initio} relativistic electronic structure codes. Additionally, the corresponding operators for two-component Hamiltonians are derived, explicitly for the zeroth order regular approximation Hamiltonian. The approach is applied to demonstrate great sensitivity of highly charged polar molecules that were recently proposed for high-precision spectroscopy in [Z\"ulch \emph{et al.}, arXiv:2203.10333[physics.chem-ph]]. In particular, a high sensitivity of a wealth of quasi-degenerate vibronic transitions in PaF$^{3+}$ and CeF$^{2+}$ to temporal variations of the fine-structure constant and the electron-proton mass ratio is shown.