Fundamental physical metrology with cold molecules

• Research unit: SERI
• Project number: 24.00351

Abstract (English)

Recently, academic research laboratories have developed advanced instrumentation to cool, manipulate and investigate molecules with extremely high precision, reaching parts in 1013 in some cases. This project aims to unlock the potentials of applying cold molecules in metrology, including the need for establishing frequency standards in the infrared (IR) spectrum, testing the fundamental laws of physics that underpin basic metrological principles, such as fundamental symmetries and variation of fundamental constants, and improved determination of fundamental constants, like the proton-to-electron and the deuteron-to-electron mass ratios, the Rydberg constant, and the proton and deuteron charge radii. In this project, fibre-optic connections built during previous EURAMET projects (e. g. EMRP JRP SIB02 NEAT-FT and EMPIR JRPs 15SIP04 TIMEFUNC, 17IND14 WRITE, 15SIB05 OFTEN and 18SIB06 TiFOON) will be used and further extended in terms of number of connections and km. Strong collaboration between NMIs and academic participants will lead to full exploitation of frequency references delivered via such fibre networks for molecular spectroscopy experiments.