"Cold Molecules: Science and Applications."

"Cold molecules are useful for doing science that ranges from fundamental particle physics to commercially important applications. I will discuss two experiments, the search for the electric dipole moment of the electron and determination of molecular identity within a mixture.We have developed methods for trace detection of molecules in mixtures, in both the optical and microwave regime. The cooling of the molecules leads to dramatic increase in the inverse of the internal molecular ro-vibrational partition function.In addition to species identification, we have also devised a method to measure the absolute chirality of the molecular species, and enantiomeric excess. We have recently demonstrated true sum-frequency generation, a type of three-wave mixing, on a chiral sample in the microwave regime. We use two orthogonally polarized resonant applied electric fields to induce a third mutually orthogonal field at their sum frequency. The phase of this induced field changes sign with enantiomer, and its amplitude provides a sensitive, quantitative measure of enantiomeric excess. The narrow rotational resonances used make this measure of enantiomeric excess fundamentally mixture compatible.In separate work, we have devised a new kind of high flux molecular beam and used it with ThO to perform a sensitive search for the electron EDM. Measurement of a non-zero electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron within a few orders of magnitude of the current best limit[1] of |de|<1.05*10-27 e*cm would be an indication of CP violation beyond the Standard Model.The ACME Collaboration is searching for an electron EDM by performing a precision measurement of electron spin precession signals from the metastable H state of thorium monoxide (ThO). I will provide a brief update on the current status of the experiment. Based on a data set acquired from 50 hours of running time over a period of two days, we have achieved a one-sigma statistical uncertainty of 6*10-29 e*cm/√T, where T is the running time in days." [1] JJ Hudson et al., "Improved measurement of the shape of the electron." Nature 473, 493 (2011)