OH hyperfine ground state: from precision measurement to molecular qubits

Abstract

We perform precision microwave spectroscopy--aided by Stark deceleration--to reveal the low magnetic field behavior of OH in its ^2Π_{3/2} ro-vibronic ground state, identifying two field-insensitive hyperfine transitions suitable as qubits and determining a differential Lande g-factor of 1.267(5)\times10^{-3} between opposite parity components of the Λ-doublet. The data are successfully modeled with an effective hyperfine Zeeman Hamiltonian, which we use to make a tenfold improvement of the magnetically sensitive, astrophysically important ΔF=\pm1 satellite-line frequencies, yielding 1720529887(10) Hz and 1612230825(15) Hz.

4+ pages, 3 figures

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Low-energy molecular collisions in a permanent magnetic trap
• Prospects for the cavity-assisted laser cooling of molecules
• $\Lambda$-doublet spectra of diatomic radicals and their dependence on fundamental constants
• Mitigation of loss within a molecular Stark decelerator
• Formation of molecular oxygen in ultracold O + OH reaction