Abstract
Measuring the hyperfine structure (HFS) of long-lived states of divalent atoms may offer the opportunity of extracting relatively unexplored nuclear magnetic octupole and electric hexadecapole moments. Here, using relativistic many-body methods of atomic structure and the nuclear shell model, we evaluate the effect of these higher nuclear moments on the hyperfine structure. We find that the sensitivity of HFS interval measurements in needed to reveal the perturbation caused by the nuclear octupole moment is on the order of kHz. The results of similar analyses for , , and are also reported.
- Received 13 September 2007
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.77.012512
©2008 American Physical Society