Not only atoms can decay the radio active molecules are subject to the law of Decay, if they are made of unstable Nuclides. While it is possible to investigate the radio-active atoms, in the meantime relatively well with the laser beams spectroscopically, the short-lived molecules is significantly more difficult. Now it is managed by an international group of researchers, for the first time, to take such a radio active molecule is under the laser-spectroscopic microscope and to elicit important characteristics.

Manfred Lindinger

editor in the Department “nature and science”.

F. A. Z.

As the research object served the researchers led by Garcia-Ruiz from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robert Berger of the University of Marburg radioactive radium fluoride. The investigated diatomic molecules active radium isotope half – lives of only a few days, depending on the involved radio. The choice to radium fluoride was not like random: calculations had previously shown that the electronic States in case of a radium fluoride with laser beams in contrast to the majority of molecules, well stimulate.

laser cooling of radioactive molecules is conceivable

In their experiments, which took place at the Isolde facility at the European research center Cern in Geneva, the irradiated radiation, the researchers artificially produced radium fluoride, with matching red and blue laser. The energy of the incident laser light was varied until the outermost electrons are left to their respective place in the case of the molecules, and ions were detected in a detector.

In this way, the group of researchers, including physicists from Kassel, Greifswald and Mainz, encountered a previously unknown excited state of energy in the radium fluoride. This could be, so Ruiz and his colleagues write in the journal “Nature”, to use radium fluoride with laser-cooling light to standstill. So you could isolate the radioactive molecule from the surroundings and trouble-free to study. Thus, the method of laser cooling would no longer be only on atoms

in order, among other things, the door would crash for precision experiments, to study such fundamental questions, for which for a long time, particle physicists are interested in. limited These include questions to the symmetry violation of the in the molecule, the forces acting count. With your spectroscopic methods, researchers can investigate Ruiz in the future also for molecules that only live for a few milliseconds before they decay radioactively.