6533b7cefe1ef96bd12571c1

RESEARCH PRODUCT

HfF+ as a candidate to search for the nuclear weak quadrupole moment

subject

description

Nuclei with a quadrupole deformation, such as $^{177}\mathrm{Hf}$ have enhanced weak quadrupole moment which induces the tensor weak electron-nucleus interaction in atoms and molecules. Corresponding parity-non-conserving (PNC) effect is strongly enhanced in the ${}^{3}{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{1}$ electronic state of the $^{177}\mathrm{HfF}^{+}$ cation which has very close opposite parity levels mixed by this tensor interaction. In the present paper we perform relativistic many-body calculations of this PNC effect. It is shown that the tensor weak interaction induced by the weak quadrupole moment gives the dominating contribution to the PNC effects in $^{177}\mathrm{HfF}^{+}$ which significantly exceeds contributions of the vector anapole moment and the scalar weak charge. The anapole and the weak charge can contribute due to the nonadiabatic mechanism proposed here. Therefore, corresponding experiment will allow one to separate the tensor weak PNC effect from the other PNC effects and to measure the quadrupole moment of the neutron distribution which gives the dominating contribution to the weak quadrupole moment.