Enhancement of the Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron in PbO

M. G. Kozlov and D. DeMille

Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 133001 – Published 4 September 2002

Abstract

The $a (1)$ state of PbO can be used to measure the electric dipole moment of the electron $d_{e}$ . We discuss a semiempirical model for this state, which yields an estimate of the effective electric field on the valence electrons in PbO. Our final result is a lower limit on the measurable energy shift, which is significantly larger than was anticipated earlier: $2 | W_{d} | d_{e} \geq 2.4 \times 10^{25} H z [\frac{d_{e}}{e c m}]$ .