arXiv:1808.05987 · Physical Review A
Spectroscopy of Sr 87 triplet Rydberg states
Roger Ding, J. D. Whalen, S. K. Kanungo, T. C. Killian, F. B. Dunning, S. Yoshida, Joachim Burgdörfer
Abstract
A combined experimental and theoretical spectroscopic study of high-$n, 30\ensuremath{\lesssim}n\ensuremath{\lesssim}100$, triplet $S$ and $D$ Rydberg states in $^{87}\mathrm{Sr}$ is presented. $^{87}\mathrm{Sr}$ has a large nuclear spin $I=9/2$, and at high-$n$ the hyperfine interaction becomes comparable to, or even larger than, the fine structure and singlet-triplet splittings, which poses a considerable challenge both for precision spectroscopy and for theory. For high-$n S$ states, the hyperfine shifts are evaluated nonperturbatively, taking advantage of earlier spectroscopic data for the $I=0$ isotope $^{88}\mathrm{Sr}$, which results in good agreement with the present measurements. For the $D$ states, this procedure is reversed by first extracting from the present $^{87}\mathrm{Sr}$ measurements the energies of the ${}^{3}{D}_{1,2,3}$ states to be expected for isotopes without hyperfine structure ($^{88}\mathrm{Sr}$), which allows the determination of corrected quantum defects in the high-$n$ limit.