Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 222, 2345-2351 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2013-02015-x

Regular Article

Investigation of the hyperfine structure of electronic levels in chromium atom

Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Metrology, Faculty of Technical Physics, Poznań University of Technology, ul. Nieszawska 13B, 60-965 Poznań, Poland

^a e-mail: Przemyslaw.Glowacki@put.poznan.pl

Received: 8 June 2013
Revised: 9 August 2013
Published online: 23 October 2013

Abstract

Measurements of the hyperfine structure (hfs) of electronic levels of the chromium atom were performed using two spectroscopic methods. For 7 energy levels (3 even parity and 4 odd parity) the magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole hyperfine interaction constants A and B were determined for the first time. In this case the method of laser induced fluorescence (LIF) on an atomic beam was used. The low lying metastable levels belonging to the term 3d⁴4s² a⁵D were remeasured by the method of laser-rf double resonance on an atomic beam (ABMR-LIRF). To improve the accuracy of hyperfine splittings measurements, the stability of the radio frequnecy (rf) generator was increased by the use of a frequency standard synchronized by a GPS signal. The values of the hfs intervals for these levels were determined with the accuracy of a few kHz. The improvement in accuracy enabled an estimation of the octupole-coupling constant C.