TOWARDS A FIELD-FREE MEASUREMENT OF PARITY VIOLATION IN ATOMIC CESIUM

Publisher Summary For several years, a field-free measurement of parity violation is being pursued in the 6S → 7S M1 transition in Cs. As compared to Stark-induced methods, field-free experiments have different systematics and absolute scales in terms of parity-conserving amplitudes. This chapter presents an experiment in which the parity was measured with two beams having same or opposite circular polarizations. In the experiment, it was found that conserving symmetry showed a strong dependence on the power of the saturated transition because of differences in the saturation behavior of the various high-frequency components. One important potential source of error is polarization imperfections caused by unavoidable stress-induced birefringence of the diode windows.