Prof. Luis Orozco, Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland and NIST

"Francium and Fundamental Symmetries"

Abstract: Francium, discovered eighty-four years ago by Margarite Perey, is the heaviest alkaline atom. It is the most unstable element of the first 103 on the periodic table, and its longest halflived isotope lasts 20 minutes. At any given time, there are only a few grams distributed throughout the earth because it is the product of the decay of uranium and thorium. In-line laser trapping and cooling with an accelerator has made it available for precision spectroscopy. With my students and collaborators, we have dedicated almost thirty years to its spectroscopic study because its atomic and nuclear structure makes it an ideal laboratory to study the weak interaction. I will present our proposal to better understand the weak interaction at low energy, preliminary measurements of the forbidden M1 transition between states 7S to 8S, and progress towards weak interaction studies (parity violation, time violation) at TRIUMF, the Canadian subatomic physics laboratory in Vancouver.

Work done by the FrPNC collaboration.