Trapped Positrons for High-Precision Magnetic Moment Measurements

A single electron in a quantum cyclotron provides the most precise measurement of the electron magnetic moment, given in units of the Bohr magneton by g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 73 (28) [0.28 ppt]. The most precise determination of the fine structure constant comes from combining this measurement with Standard Model theory, yielding $\alpha^{-1} = 137.035 999 173 (34)$ [0.25 ppb], limited by the experimental uncertainty of the electron g-value. The most stringent test of CPT symmetry in leptons comes from comparing the electron and positron magnetic moments, limited by the positron uncertainty at 4.2 ppt. A new high-stability apparatus has been built and commissioned for improved measurements of the electron and positron magnetic moments, a greatly improved test of lepton CPT symmetry, and an improved determination of the fine structure constant. These new measurements require robust positron loading from a retractable radioactive source that is small enough to avoid compromising the high-precision environment of our experiment. The design and implementation of such a scheme is a central focus of this work. Robust positron loading at a rate of $1-2 e^+/min$ from a $6.5 \mu Ci^{22}Na$ source has been demonstrated.Physic

The FIRST-Optical-VLA Survey for Lensed Radio Lobes

We present results from a survey for gravitationally lensed radio lobes. Lensed lobes are a potentially richer source of information about galaxy mass distributions than lensed point sources, which have been the exclusive focus of other recent surveys. Our approach is to identify radio lobes in the FIRST catalog and then search optical catalogs for coincident foreground galaxies, which are candidate lensing galaxies. We then obtain higher-resolution images of these targets at both optical and radio wavelengths, and obtain optical spectra for the most promising candidates. We present maps of several radio lobes that are nearly coincident with galaxies. We have not found any new and unambiguous cases of gravitational lensing. One radio lobe in particular, FOV J0743+1553, has two hot spots that could be multiple images produced by a z=0.19 spiral galaxy, but the lensing interpretation is problematic.Comment: 38 pages, 18 figures, aastex, accepted to A

Experiments with Highly-Ionized Atoms in Unitary Penning Traps

Highly-ionized atoms with special properties have been proposed for interesting applications, including potential candidates for a new generation of optical atomic clocks at the one part in 1019 level of precision, quantum information processing and tests of fundamental theory. The proposed atomic systems are largely unexplored. Recent developments at NIST are described, including the isolation of highly-ionized atoms at low energy in unitary Penning traps and the use of these traps for the precise measurement of radiative decay lifetimes (demonstrated with a forbidden transition in Kr17+), as well as for studying electron capture processes