Speaker
Description
The study of the hyperfine structure (HFS) in electronic transitions in diatomic molecules is a challenging task due to its experimental and theoretical complexity. We want to study the HFS of one of the $c^{3}\Sigma^{+}$ excited states of the KRb molecule, because previous studies indicated that the splitting may be much larger than in similar alkali metal diatomics $^{1}$. Another motivation is that the $c^{3}\Sigma^{+}$ state serves as an intermediate state for transferring cold Feshbach molecules from the $a^{3}\Sigma^{+}$ state to the ground $X^{1}\Sigma^{+}$ state $^{2}$. Due to the proximity of the $B^{1}\Pi$ state, perturbations caused by the spin-orbit interaction are observed. This makes possible to observe transition to the mixed pair of states from the singlet $X^{1}\Sigma^{+}$ state.
We report on the experimental setup for observation of hyperfine structure of the $X^{1}\Sigma^{+}$ - ($c^{3}\Sigma^{+}$, $B^{1}\Pi$) transition. Single laser saturation and polarization spectroscopy and also optical-optical double resonance saturation spectroscopy in V configuration is used. The obtained experimental results will be presented at the conference.
References
1. A. Pashov et. al Phys. Rev. A 76, 022511 (2007)
2. Ni et al., Science 322, 231 (2008)
